From Culture Shock to Cross-cultural Adaptation: Narrative inquiry of a Kenyan student’s journey in Pakistan (original) (raw)
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Academic Challenges of Turkish International Students in Pakistan: A Qualitative Study
PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences
Studying abroad is quite interesting for the students who wish to learn new cultures and languages. Some students prefer to go abroad for higher education so they can also get to experience different culture, people, languages and learn many other things about the host country. When students choose to go abroad for higher education, they are faced with many challenges in education. Every country has their own unique education style and it is quite challenging to adjust to different academic teaching style and new learning environment. This particular study examines the issues surrounding Turkish international students experience of higher education in Pakistan. Qualitative methodology was employed to penetrate into the topic under investigation. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 6 Turkish students. By using Thematic Analysis five themes emerged: (a) language barrier, (b) un-coperative classfellows, (c) expectations from teachers, (d) different study methods, (e) inability to express in class. The findings both supports and contribute new aspects to the knowledge of this experience. A number of recommendations are made to enable those who come to Pakistan from Turkey to adapt and make the transition necessary in order to enhance their experience of pursuing education in a foriegn country.
Cross-Cultural Narratives: Stories and Experiences of International Students
STAR Scholars, 2021
Living and studying away from home can turn out to be an enriching and rewarding experience for many international students. Yet, many of them struggle to cope with their new university life due to distinct challenges such as cultural differences, language and communication barriers, and a lack of social support. Through a diverse collection of personal essays, this book captures some of the stories of international students as they reflect on their intercultural encounters, expectations, and experiences in their new surroundings and local communities. Essay themes range from culture shock to resilience, and they cover a variety of topics including the ways students change and gain new perspectives by being away from their comfort zone, the feeling of isolation and being an outsider, and the uncertainties of making new friends. This book provides readers with a unique opportunity to walk a mile in the shoes of an international student. It also highlights the importance of a strong support system for students in both the curricular and co-curricular settings and offers insights to international educators and university administrators into creating a welcoming environment that fosters international understanding and cross-cultural awareness on campus.
Foreign Students’ Adjustment in Early Days of Their University Education: The Stress and Strains
Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2015
The study purported to understand the experiences of foreign students on their early days of their university education. A lot has been done to ascertain how students generally fare on university campuses but little research attention had been paid to how people from different socio-cultural, political and economic backgrounds fared when they settled to commence their education in a foreign land, and how they managed the challenges. The qualitative study used 26 international students from five countries pursuing undergraduate education at the Catholic University College of Ghana. The study unveils that the international students in the University College experience some social, academic and economic challenges in their early days on campus. The study has brought to the fore the inadequacy of the measures that the authorities put in place to enhance international students' adjustment on campus. The university authority needs to have special and intensive orientation for its fresh international students to ameliorate, if not to eradicate, the hardships such students encounter when they gain admission and commenced their study. The knowledge gained from the study is key to tertiary institutions in formulating effective orientation and strategies for institutions that admit international students.
2010
Malaysia has had a degree of success in establishing itself as a regional education hub in recent years and private higher education institutions are significant players that dominate the international student market because more than 50% of the international student population in Malaysia is enrolled in these institutions. The phenomenon of adjustment has not been studied extensively in the Malaysian setting. Therefore, this study sets out to investigate the essence of socio-cultural and academic adjustment experiences of international students in an established private higher education institution. The informants of this study comprised 21 international students from 7 countries. A multiple case study design was adopted. The semi-structured interview method of data collection was employed. The interviews were then recorded and transcribed verbatim. The themes were then captured in phenomenologically sensitive descriptions which resonate with the experiences of the international st...
Challenges Faced by International Students: A Case Study of Jambi’s Institute of Higher Learning
Dinamika Ilmu
Although there have been many studies investigating international students, many of them focused on the students who travel in pursuit of higher education in English countries and/or universities. This current qualitative study is intended to explore the experiences of international students, particularly the challenges, and strategies to deal with the challenges and the culture shock while studying in Jambi, Indonesia. In order to collect the data, a semi-structured interview was employed and guided by an interview protocol to stimulate the participants in answering the questions during the interview. The participants of this study were nine international students who studied at one public university in Jambi. Through thematic analysis, we found that international students faced some challenges living and studying in Jambi, such as language issues, academic issues, individual issues, and living style and related issues. To overcome the challenges, international students employed tw...
'You Can't Go Home Again': Students Adjustment to New Cultural Environments Abroad
Experiencing culture shock in a foreign culture is not a weakness or negative indication of future international success. Culture shock including its variety of symptoms and outcomes is a completely normal physical and psychological reaction to foreign environments and a part of successful adaptation process-the best and may be even the only means to experience and understand foreign cultures. The anxiety and stress related to the adaptation process are shocking but the extent of adjustment does not depend on whether the negative symptoms of culture shock are experienced, but how they are coped with. Adaptation in the culture of hosts can be made through different learning processes rather than single learning process that can have positive outcomes in the end, by serving as a hint that something is not right and therefore motivating thinking about how to adjust that can help reduce ethnocentrism and increase acceptance of cultural diversity and appreciation of cultural integrity relating to the challenges of an unfamiliar environment. It is important for spoon-fed theoretically nurtured Nepalese students to grow through this discomfort in order to understand them better and to gain new sensitivities that encourages personal and intercultural competency developments, positive learning experiences leading to increased self-awareness and personal growth in a comparatively developed pragmatic host culture.
This paper examines the salient difficulties as experienced by international students from developing countries studying in Western universities. International students as review of several studies done in this paper has shown may be getting lost in transition due to the enormous nature of challenges they have to surmount while abroad. The extant literature on study abroad challenges used the culture shock framework to reveal some of the problems the sojourners encounter in the course of their living and studying abroad in Western universities. This paper has examined the nature of such culture shock experiences and how it affected this group of travelers abroad. As the review revealed, culture shock experiences of sojourners has obvious negative psychological and social implications in their overall wellbeing which is akin to getting lost in transition. Likewise, the Albert Ellis theoretical framework examined in this paper has shown that the manner at which events are appraised may mediate the kind of effect it will produce. In this regards, the international students' experiences of overwhelming acculturation challenges may be partly based on the kind of mental interpretation they give to the conditions they meet abroad. It is concluded that international students sometimes approach foreign cultures with ethnocentrism and in-group bias which affect them in reconciling the differences in values and conditioning between their home and the host culture. Travelling to a novel and unfamiliar cultural environment has not been easy for international students. Although other travelers experience cross-cultural challenges, international students experiences has becomes an area of concern because the effects of cross-cultural difficulties manifest and affect their academic, social and self-realization process. Intercultural contact therefore has over the history been associated with adjustment problems and with the expansion of educational exchanges and the quality of education in the western world, there has been an enormous increase in the number of students travelling abroad from the developing countries. Thus, the exponential growth in the number of international students
International Student’s Studying Abroad Challenges: Culture Shock?
International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review, 2015
This article x-rays the understanding of international students' difficulties and challenges while they are studying abroad. The articles argue against the common understanding of foreign students' challenges abroad as culture shock and provides some insights as to why their experiences may not be that of culture shock. Using the framework of psychological trauma, the paper provides conceptual connections between culture shock and psychological trauma and evidences some of the reasons why the stages of culture shock may not necessarily apply to the experiences of foreign students while they are studying abroad. Examples are drawn from an empirical study on some group of international students whose experiences resembled those of psychological trauma as opposed to culture shock. The paper concludes that reexamining this area of knowledge has become important, such that the appropriate support will be provided to the international students when they face difficulties abroad.
CULTURE SHOCK: A TALE OF STUDENT SOJOURN IN INDIA
This paper takes the concept of Culture Shock as a theoretical base to understand the cultural challenges faced by the International student community in the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) located in Western India. Culture Shock studies have been undertaken mostly to benefit student sojourners from developing countries who travel to the West, mostly to European or American Universities to live and study. However, Intercultural studies about student sojourners travelling to developing countries and especially to Indian Universities have rarely been undertaken. There is a huge influx of international students to the city of Pune in Western India every year for the purpose of education. There is most often a need for streamlining the process of cultural adjustment for these students, as many problems are faced by the student as he passes through the various phases of cultural shock during his stay in a foreign country, starting from the honeymoon phase to the final adjustment phase. Therefore, the researchers chose to conduct a qualitative study based in the same surroundings of the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU). Through a method of in depth interviews and a non probability sampling technique, 12 students belonging to nine different nationalities studying in the University were interviewed and the findings revealed that India being a very diverse country posed a lot of significant cultural challenges for these student sojourners who came from all parts of the globe. The intensity of challenges faced were most glaringly identified in their initial paperwork and registration after arrival, their immediate academic environment be it in class or inside the campus, housing (hostel or rented accommodation), food, language and safety conditions. While their phases of adjustment did not largely follow the typical U-curve of Culture Shock, their negotiations with various practical challenges of living and studying in the city as a foreign student opened up a lot of suggestions and solutions, both from the respondents and the researchers' perspectives. This paper gives a detailed report underlining these challenges and provides some practical suggestions for the use of Indian civil authorities, teachers and the University. This would attempt to reduce the effects of culture shock for the International student community at SPPU through which their cultural adjustment in the University and India could be made more comfortable and fruitful.