Acculturative Stories of International Students from Belt and Road Countries in China

DOI

10.2991/icsshe-19.2019.9How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Ethnographic study, international students, culture shock, acculturation, the Belt and Road initiative

Abstract

This article focuses on international students from Belt and Road (B&R) countries at a university in central China. Since the B&R initiative was proposed, the number of international students in China from B&R countries has increased rapidly, but related research is seldom found. To analyze the problems and difficulties these international students face in their daily life and study in China, and to explore culture shock and acculturation process of them, an ethnographic approach was applied using the combined methods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews which ethnography characterizes. It is found that language barriers are a prominent problem. Different students had different experiences in social connection. They also had different opinions on Chinese faculty members and courses. Besides, culture shock is normally mentioned in the interviews. In the end, some implications of improving the acculturation of these international students are discussed. In addition, this study is also a supplement of the existing research on international students in China.

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  - Xinman Li
AU  - Ying Luo
AU  - Shuhui Lai
AU  - Taotao Long
PY  - 2019/08
DA  - 2019/08
TI  - Acculturative Stories of International Students from Belt and Road Countries in China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2019 5th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 88
EP  - 91
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsshe-19.2019.9
DO  - 10.2991/icsshe-19.2019.9
ID  - Li2019/08
ER  -