| Accompanied by the rapid development of communication and transportationtechnology, the world is getting smaller and smaller. With the impact of globalization,China is attracting millions of international visitors every year due to the dramaticdevelopment in both the Chinese society and economy. Among all the visitors toChina, a large and still increasing number of international students are studying inChina. The number of them is so large that importance and attention should beattached to it.The research subjects of this study are sixty international students who arestudying at universities in Nanjing currently. Drawing on previous related researchfindings and some important theories in the field of intercultural adaptation, this thesishas four research objects. The first is to find out the general situation of theseinternational students’ intercultural adaptation in Nanjing, socioculturally,psychologically and academically. The second is to study how internal and externalfactors affect their intercultural adaptation outcomes. The third to investigate thesimilarities and commodities exist during their intercultural adaptation process andtheir major difficulties. The last one is to find out what can be done to improve andfacilitate their intercultural adaptation.The present study utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods. Mainlybased on Colleen Ward’s two aspects of intercultural adaptation theory, the authordeveloped the questionnaire and the interview questions with modification fromexisting scales. The data contained from questionnaires and interviews are thenanalyzed through descriptive statistics such as percentage and mean and are processedwith the help of the SPSS to conduct the reliability test, analysis of variance andcorrelation analysis.Results indicate that the international students at universities in Nanjing met withsome sociocultural and psychological difficulties but not much on the whole, and theyexperienced the most difficulties in academic adaptation, which was the least ideal. Results also show that internal factors of demographic variables (gender, age, countryof origin, length of residence, previous experience of intercultural contact, educationalbackground), personality, language ability, and identity conflict and external factors ofcultural distance, cultural related variables and social support interplay with eachother and combined to affect the students’ intercultural adaptation in Nanjing. |
