It gives me great plｅasure to write the foreword to this book. When Professor An Ran began her studies in the UK in 1996, she was my first doctoral student from China. She found herself in a very linguistically diverse society. A recent survey showed, for instance, that over 300 different languages are spoken by London school children. The educational experiences of minority language speaking children have attracted growing interest in recent years but, in the mid-1990s when this study was in progress, Chinese children had received very little attention. Although there had been some discussion of the children from Hong Kong who had settled in the UK in the 1960s and the 1970s, no one had yet focused on children from Mainland China. Professor An Ran's research thus marked the start of an exciting voyage of discovery, the success of which depended on her status as an insider researcher, able to access information and insights available only to someone who shares the language and the culture of the participants in the process.

The study presented in this book provides very valuable insights for people in the West of the approaches to the teaching of reading and writing which characterize Chinese education and which, often, differ in important ways respects from what happens in western classrooms. Critically, it offers an alternative view of practices such as repetition and memorization which have a much lower profile in western education. In an increasingly globalized world, such insights are of considerable importance.

The study also has important implications for intercultural communication. For me, one of the high points of the study was when I joined Professor An Ran in collecting data from parents and teachers. The aim was to explore the insights of both teachers and parents of children's progress in schools. Before and after scheduled parent-teacher meetings, Professor An Ran interviewed parents first about their expectations of the meetings and, later, about the extent to which these expectations had been met. I did the same with the teachers. On analyzing the responses, it emerged that Chinese parents expressed frustration because the teachers seemed unwilling to identify their children's weaknesses. While it was true that teachers did not speak in terms of weaknesses, they did, in fact, talk about 'targets' to be achieved. It rapidly became clear that parents and teachers had the same goals, but their use of language made it appear that this was not the case. 

This realization has important implications for improving the educational experiences of Chinese children in the UK: simple explanations of the expectations of both teachers and parents have the potential to reduce misunderstanding and improve cooperation. The methodology employed by Professor An Ran was essential in arriving at this realization. It was driven by the desire to improve educational outcomes for Chinese children and achieved by using a multi-method approach which gave voice to all the participants. Unlike essentialist approaches, the research issues were allowed to emerge from the data rather than being imposed by the researcher. 

I commend this book to students and researchers interested in using qualitative methodologies to explore issues of educational importance, particularly in the context of globalization.


Viv Edwards FRSA

Professor of Language in Education

University of Reading, UK