A Study On The Cross-cultural Adaptation Of The International Chinese Volunteer Teachers In Thailand

With the rapid development of Chinese economy, the enhancement in comprehensive national power, the improving in China's international status, foreign political, economic as well as the increasing in the frequency of cultural exchanges, the international community's demand on study Chinese language is growing rapidly. In 2004 the China's Ministry of Education began implementing the "International Chinese Volunteer Teachers Program" and has sent more than 7,000 Chinese volunteer teachers to teach Chinese language in many countries around the world. In recent years, Thailand has become one of the most important destination countries for sending Chinese volunteer teachers where the number of volunteer teachers has been increasing year by year, and since myself is an exchanged student whom now is studying in the cross cultural environments, I know that these Chinese volunteer teachers will have to fact a major problem of cross-cultural adaptation, if we do not pay enough attention to the problems and take an immediate action in time, these problems may cause some other undesirable results such as an ineffective in Chinese language teaching or a massive pressure of the Chinese volunteer teachers themselves. Although there are more and more researches in the field of cross cultural adaptation, there are only few amounts of researches that focus on the cross cultural adaption of the teachers.This thesis takes the length of time that Chinese volunteer teachers went to Thailand and the cross-cultural training as explanatory variables while taking socio-cultural adaptation and psychological adaptation as explained variables, in attempting to validate the three research hypotheses that relevant to the field of cross-cultural adaptation. The thesis first verifies the theory of cross-cultural adaptation model by searching for the relationship between the degrees of socio-cultural adaptation and psychological adaptation of the Chinese volunteer teachers and dividing them into four different types of adaptation; the thesis also shows the different trends of socio-cultural adaptation and psychological adaptation of the Chinese volunteer teachers along with the different length of time staying in Thailand; the thesis also verifies whether or not cross-cultural training has an impact on Chinese volunteer teachers adaptation; Finally, discuss the results and make some suggestions to improve cross-cultural adaptation of Chinese volunteers.