Cross-cultural Adaptation Of Chinese Undergraduate Students In America

With the development of globalization in the information age,people with different cultural backgrounds have more opportunities to communicate with each other.However,the communication among diverse cultures must be accompanied by conflicts and contradictions because of the cultural differences.Cross-cultural adaptation,thus,as a kind of trend,has become increasingly important.Among them,international students account for a large proportion.In the process of interacting with local people,the custom,values in their original culture have undergone huge changes,which bring them not only a sense of excitement but also tremendous physical and mental stress.In 1960,American anthropologist Kalvero Oberg further developed Lysgaard's(1955)cross-cultural adaptation theory,and put forward the term culture shock,indicating that with the absence of the original familiar symbols,sojourners would experience severe anxiety.He proposed a four-stage theory,referring that sojourners would experience a similar U-curve adaptation process in an unfamiliar cultural environment,that is,the honeymoon period,the crisis period,the adjustment period,and the biculturalism period.However,it is proved that this is not applicable to all of the people.In recent years,the number of Chinese students studying abroad has increased dramatically,but there are only a handful of studies on their overseas adaptation.In addition,the process of cross-cultural adaptation is continuously developing,so that people in different eras will also show different adaptation conditions as the time changes.Therefore,this article investigates 83 Chinese undergraduates who have studied in the United States for about one year in recent years.Based on the theory of culture shock,combined with questionnaires and interviews,this article focuses on the problems of the cross-cultural adaptation during distinct four stages with the time sojourners spend abroad,as well as whether the current cross-cultural adaptation of these Chinese students is in line with the theory.All of the data are mainly carried out through the online questionnaire platform “Wenjuanxing”,and the effective results areput into SPSS analysis software for data collation analysis and calculation.In addition,by comparing the similarities and differences between the four-stage theory and this empirical analysis,it provides existing adaptive problems in different stages and corresponding suggestions,which conduct a valuable empirical study for current Chinese overseas students and also provide a cultural guidance for Chinese students who are going to the United States.It shows that the current cultural adaptation does not fully conform to the theory of culture shock.The feeling of loss,anxiety and even anger in the theory of culture shock are not obvious in the performance of these Chinese students.And their cross-cultural adaptation level has been in a relatively good state with less fluctuations.In addition,excitement and curiousness in the honeymoon period can hardly be found,and the value of overall cross-cultural adaptation is gradually rising,showing a trend of cultural integration,rather than the U-curve proposed by the culture shock.It can be seen that cross-cultural adaptation has a strong epochal character and requires constant tests of the latest research data.Therefore,more practical analysis and more targeted suggestions for contemporary students to alleviate the cultural shock become the top priority.