Foreign Students In China Adaptability

Going abroad as a student means being suddenly confronted with a completely new environment. Streets and houses look foreign, shops do not sell ones favourite food, the climate is different and even small things like door handles or showers do not work in the same way as they used to do at home; there a no familiar people around and the foreign language which is spoken in the host country is probably the thing that confuses most. The encounter of those unfamiliar cues in a new culture often leads to the experience of the so-called culture shock.Being in China myself and the interest in our fellow students' way of coping with their new situation was the purpose for finding out more about the phenomenon of culture shock and thus making it the topic of my research project I had to conduct in the line of a psychology course at Nanjing Normal UniversityThe study of literature provided me with the necessary background information on different definitions and theories of culture shock and its sequences, e.g. the U-curve or the W-curve consisting of certain stages such as the honeymoon stage, disintegration stage, re-integration stage, autonomy stage and independence stage. I also found out about the wide range of symptoms that are likely to occur with people suffering from culture shock, e.g. strain, a feeling of loss, loneliness, deprivation, hypochondria etc.I used a questionnaire, the Expatriate Adaptation Inventory (EAI) in order to gather information needed for this research. In that questionnaire the questions covered a variety of different areas, such as the students' nationality, study situation, experience abroad, satisfaction with life in China, feelings towards the host country and other questions related to culture shock symptoms.All together, 181 participants completed the inventory. And against the background of hypotheses we had set up in advance, we evaluated the gathered material, and in the end we found most of our hypotheses confirmed.Consequently, all African students, boys and girls, undergraduate and graduate, whether coming from Arab countries or under Sahara, whether they have lived abroad before coming in China or not, or whether they have before coming in China or not, experience culture shock. Further, the social contact turned out to be a vital factor in lightening the students' process of adjustment in the host country. Besides, African female students seem to experience culture shock more than do African male students while those who have experience abroad can easily reach the stage of acculturisation more than those who have never been abroad before coming in China. Finally, African students who have worked in their home countries before moving to China seem to be less adaptable than those who just completed their studies.Some reasons that make African students suffer from culture shock with such an intensity and lasting could be the absence of any training program in culture shock whether in their home countries or in China, the absence of structures in each University and college in their host country that could help them dealing with culture shock phenomenon and probably most importantly the lacking of enough communication between Chinese people and African students leading them to a life in enclave instead of an integration in the Chinese culture.