Research On Acculturation Of Japanese Students In Beijing

In recent years, as the development of globalization, the worldwide cooperation in economy, education, culture has become increasingly close. Education of overseas student has also been greatly developed. With the growing population of foreign students, their acculturation problems have aroused great concern. Previous studies and practice show that compared to students from Europe, America and Southeast Asia, Japanese students from the Chinese Cultural Circle were in poorer condition of acculturation. There are still many problems in their acculturation process. Based on this situation, this paper carried on a survey on Japanese students at seven universities in Beijing to investigate the following questions:First, how is the acculturation level of Japanese students in Beijing? Second, what are the factors that have significant influence on their adaptation? Third, what are the practical proposals we can put forward to improve their acculturation?On the basis of previous theories, this paper will research from four dimensions which are language adaptation, psychological adaptation, life adaptation and culture adaptation. We use questionnaires and students’essay for data collecting and SPSS 19.0 software for data processing and analysis. In this paper, there are five chapters:The first chapter is the introduction, mainly introduces the background and significance of the research, and reviews domestic and foreign studies on acculturation. The second chapter is research methodology, including participants, procedure and instruments. Chapter three and chapter four are the main part of this thesis. The third chapter describes the results of this survey, including the overview of their acculturation and descriptions of different performance in four dimensions. In according to the results, the fourth chapter discusses influential factors on their acculturation, including Chinese level, staying time in Beijing, gender and learning purposes. The fifth chapter is conclusions and proposals, which summarizes the findings of this paper and put forward relevant advice.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:Firstly, Japanese students stay in a good condition of acculturation in general. Their language adaptation, life adaptation, psychological adaptation and cultural adaptation are higher than the medium level. However, there are still many problems to be solved in their acculturation process. In language dimension, Japanese Students have relatively poor verbal ability, which also limited their opportunities to communicate with other foreign students; in life dimension, it is quite difficult for Japanese students to adapt to air pollution, public environment and service in Beijing; in psychological dimension Japanese students prone to feel homesick, insecure and pressure of learning; in cultural dimension, they lack of interests and knowledge in Beijing’s history and traditional art.Secondly, Japanese students’ performances of acculturation varied depending on gender, age, staying time, language levels, learning styles, education backgrounds, tuition sources and ethnic group. But the significant factors are just gender, language level and staying time. Chinese level has a significant influence on their language adaptation, while gender and staying time have a significant influence on cultural adaptation, and staying time impact significantly on their psychological adaptation.Thirdly, based on the results, this paper found that due to their better verbal ability, larger communication range and lighter mental pressure, advanced students perform significantly better than elementary and intermediate students in language adaptation. Variation in Japanese students’ acculturation presents generally as same as U-curve distribution and Culture-shock model. The reason for Japanese girls’ better cultural adaption than boys’ is that Japanese girls have more interests in Chinese language and culture participate in more cultural activities. And students who are interested in Chinese language and culture have a high level of cultural adaption, since they usually take integration motivation and participate in cultural activities initiatively. In addition, due to the complex and unstable political relations between China and Japan in these years, most Japanese media coverage overwhelming negative reports about China which has brought powerful psychological pressure to Japanese students before they study in China.