Cross-cultural experiences of culture shock abroad: are international students getting lost in transition in the western cultures?

Abstract

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.