Mark Anderson on language, literacy, and schools as ecosystems — research, practice, and the conditions for learning.
We learn to speak without being taught, and to read only if somebody teaches us. I spent seven posts trying to work out whether unnatural is the right word for that difference, and I am still not certain it is.
Start with Our Brains Were Not Born to Read…Right?
I came to this research late, and from a school rather than a lab. These are the studies I keep returning to, and my attempts to say plainly what they do and do not show.
Start with Research Highlight 4: Structuring Classroom Learning for Student Success and Agency
Acoustics, air, greenery — the conditions nobody writes an intervention about. I posed this analogy over a decade ago and have been struggling to make it practical ever since.
Start with The Influence of Acoustics on Learning
Watching a statistical model acquire something that behaves like grammar has changed how I think about what children are doing. I have made claims here I later had to walk back.
Start with LLMs, Statistical Learning, and Explicit Teaching
Every now and then, I'll highlight an interesting research item I've happened across in greater depth. I will keep a running list of them posted here.
In this series, we expand on our previous exploration of language by considering what computational neural networks may be able to tell us about language and what language may be able to tell us about LLMs – and, ultimately…
Before I started an entire blog on the concept, I had the seed of an idea: growing healthy food is akin to supporting the learning of children.
We have spent some time picking away at the tension between the generalizations and assumptions made around whether reading and writing development is natural or unnatural.
Is learning language natural? Is learning to read unnatural?
In this collection of posts, we examine two 2003 papers from Keith Stanovich, including one co-authored with Paula Stanovich, that remain highly relevant to conversations today about the science of reading. Through this review…
The writing about schools is one seam of something longer. A Writing Life collects 156 pieces and 168 shorts from 1993–2025 — fiction, poems, travel chronicles, two blogs and the columns — drawn from an archive of nearly two thousand, and mapped so you can see where the preoccupations recur.
I write about language, literacy, and how schools work as ecosystems. Subscribe and you’ll get new posts by email — I don’t publish too often, so likely no more than a handful a year.