Surviving Culture Shock in Singapore Tourism Context

DOI

10.2991/icoborot-18.2019.29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

culture shock, adaptation, intercultural communication competencies.

Abstract

Culture shock is one of many challenges in tourism. Knowing the native culture and having good intercultural communication are essential for tourism professional. It can happen to anyone when they come to foreign country and also happened to some trainees from Indonesia who do job training in Singapore. The study aimed at identifying the culture shock faced by the students, how they adapt to it, and how to overcome the problem. The study is qualitative and employed ethnography method. The main participants were 24 students from one of Indonesian Tourism Colleges and their 8 Singaporean supervisors as supporting participants. The result of the study shows that trainees faced 3 levels of inconvenience: high, medium, and low. Another aspect related to the communication intercultural competencies are Fundamental Competence, Social Competence, Social Skill, Interpersonal Competence, Linguistic Competence, Communicative Competence, Relational Competence. The most dominant aspect experienced by the students is Language. It was found that there were three categories of students’ adaptation, namely quickly, middle, and slowly. The process of trainees’ adaptation involves four stages, embracing: euphoria, crisis, a period of consciousness and struggle, a period of multicultural enjoyment. Hence, Tourism College should improve the quality and quantity of the instruction to let the students master those competencies.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Diana Simanjuntak
AU  - Septy Indrianty
PY  - 2019/12
DA  - 2019/12
TI  - Surviving Culture Shock in Singapore  Tourism Context
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference One Belt, One Road, One Tourism (ICOBOROT 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 94
EP  - 98
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icoborot-18.2019.29
DO  - 10.2991/icoborot-18.2019.29
ID  - Simanjuntak2019/12
ER  -