Intercultural Adaptation Of Teachers As Visiting Scholars Abroad

With the increasing cultural globalization and the advent of big data era,intercultural communication is neither static nor monolithic but fluid and constantly evolving.People from all walks of life have the possibility to experience different cultures.A skyrocketing number of university teachers pursue academic exchanges outside their home cultures.As a special group,they have caught researchers' attention.This study,as an exploratory effort on this issue,tries to analyze and ponder over the intercultural adaptation experience of the visiting teachers so as to extract some useful suggestions for better adaptation.The group of this research is narrowed down to non-English professional teachers of Hebei Agricultural University who took Business Foreign Language Test(BFT)in 2016.The author adopts quantitative and qualitative method to explore the answers to the research questions.This research selected 34 teachers to do the questionnaire and 6 teachers to take the in-depth interview by random sample.Hopefully,this study may also provide a reference for future visiting scholars training of improving intercultural adaptability.The research procedures are as follows: firstly,the author collects the results of Business Foreign Language Test(BFT)in 2016 from the teacher who is in charge of this project.After that,the author sorts the visiting information out;secondly,the author delivers Web-based questionnaires to the qualified respondents,then all the raw data is analyzed by Questionnaire Star and SPSS;thirdly,6 participants are chosen to do the in-depth interview based on random sampling and then data is recorded and interpreted with the aid of digital voice recorder;finally,the author discusses whether gender,educational background,age and length of stay has any effect on the intercultural adaptation of visiting scholars abroad.This study finds that the visiting scholars of Hebei Agricultural University manifest good intercultural adaptation performance on the whole.They are able to adjust themselves to daily life and work conditions efficiently and effectively.The biggest problem comes down to English proficiency.Moreover,they present special characteristics of intercultural adaptation on gender,educational background and intercultural adaptation stages,which are opposite to the hypothesis.The results show the intercultural adaptation situation does not have significant differences in gender,education level and length of stay because of the limitation of questionnaire sample.However,in regard to a single dimension of intercultural adaptation status,different length of stay is significantly different in the acculturation stage.Different age group is negatively associated with the acculturation status of teachers,whereas,the correlation is not significant.These findings show that English proficiency is the solid foundation for communication.Cultural intelligence,good social support and an adaptive personality contribute to better intercultural adaptation.