>Herb,
   As I understand it, the recognition that mind and language are both
widely 'embodied' has huge implications for grammar, much more than
just that we have different learning styles. You can argue that even
the most abstract of our cognitions have a base in our sensory-motor
experience of the world. To be within a language, of course, they are
also culturally shared and culturally shaped.
   It's not just the words, but the combinations (constructions) that have
meaning (and meaningful) functions.
   We shouldn't teach as a basic philosophy that there are correct and
incorrect, but meaningfully neutral ways of expressing ideas that exist
independent of their formation in language.
   Grammar is not just a range of forms.

Craig

 I've been slow to respond to this issue because I have a high and
> somewhat rueful respect for the power of a metaphor, and the right
> brain/left brain metaphor is a powerful one that has swept through
> education, the social sciences, and popular science writing.  In spite
> of the fact that it's largely hooey.
>
> A part of brain research up into the sixties involved research into
> localization of function, and the study of hemispheric lateralization
> and the consequences of hemispherectomy or of the surgical severing of
> the corpus callosum led to interesting hypotheses about the functions of
> the hemispheres and their behavior under pathological conditions.
> Culturally, this research became something of the elephant in the
> bathtub:  it spread quickly into the popular magazines and from there
> into educational circles as the right/left brain metaphor.  However,
> brain researchers were well aware, and cautioned others, that they were
> studying abnormal phenomena that didn't necessarily shed light on the
> functioning of the normal brain.
>
> Once techniques like MRI and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) became
> available, much subtler studies of brain function became possible, and
> techniques have gotten even better since then.  One of the major
> findings about language was that language activity in normal subjects,
> subjects without a diagnosable neural pathology, activated areas all
> over the brain and in both hemispheres.  Different activities, like
> processing irregular vs. regular verbs, were distributed differently,
> but they still involved areas all over the brain.  The same was true of
> lexical storage, retrieval, and learning.
>
> As a metaphor, the right brain/left brain dichotomy encapsulates some
> very broad-brushed differences in learning styles, interests, abilities,
> etc.  But the danger of taking the metaphor as scientific reality is
> that we overlook the fact that differences like these are scalar and
> multi-faceted in ways that a dichotomy simply can't capture.  Gordon and
> others are entirely correct in their approach that we must consider
> individual learning styles and not reduce them to a simple,
> broad-brushed metaphor.
>
> Herb
>
> Dick -
>
> I think that the issue goes beyond being "like us" (yes, I, too, admit
> to an
> ancient attachment to diagramming!) and reaches to the heart of the
> issue
> that we have with NCTE and their various attacks against grammar.
>
> If we can move grammar away from the side of the writing process that
> deals
> with error correction and more towards what classical rhetoric would
> call
> "invention," then we can demonstrate that grammar can, indeed, play a
> major
> role in creative ("right brain") part  the writing process.  In fact, I
> think that grammar can a more powerful creative tool than so-called
> "unstructure free-writing."
>
> Students can use standard grammatical constructions to create original,
> powerful sentences, paragraphs, and even entire essays starting with
> little
> more than simple subject-predicate combinations.  There truly is a
> grammar
> for the right brain, and as you indicated, it doesn't need to be
> separated
> from the left brain.  In fact, it is the structure of grammar that
> allows
> both halves to work so well together!
>
> Grammar is an "all brain" subject!
>
> Geoff Layton
>
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