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 methodology employed by Professor An Ran 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.