Dr Mark Betteney is Associate Professor in Education, Language and Learning at University of Greenwich. He trained to be a teacher in 1988-9 and taught in primary schools in northwest Kent and southeast London until 2005. In that time, he led the teaching of music and literacy in three schools and became intrigued to know whether teaching children to read music in the early stages of language acquisition would benefit their ability to learn to decode text. The pursuit of this question resulted in his doctorate, and in his ongoing interest in education research. He became a senior lecturer (teacher training) at London Metropolitan University in 2005, then principal lecturer at University of Greenwich in 2010, and Associate Professor in 2022.