Communicating in foreign lands: The cause, consequences and cures of culture shock

Abstract

To cite this article: Adrian Furnham (1993) Communicating in foreign lands: The cause, consequences and cures of culture shock, Language, Culture and Curriculum, 6:1, 91-109, Abstract The ability to communicate well in a foreign culture is considered as a set of learnable social skills. The notion of culture shock is introduced to cover a broad range of psychological and social reactions to immersion in another culture, many of them detrimental to communication. Programmes aimed at reducing the harmful effects of culture shock are examined in terms of the strategies adopted: (1) information giving, (2) cultural sensitisation, (3) isomorphic attribution, (4) learning by doing, and (5) social skills training (SST). The latter, it is argued, is the most effective

Cultural adaptation in different facets of life and the impact of language: a case study of personal adjustment patterns during study abroad

“…The "cultural learning" framework assumes that intercultural challenges are caused by an individual's inadequate skills for dealing with unfamiliar social demands, and sees adaptation as a process of gradually learning to function in a different culture (Bennett, 1993;Bochner, 1986;Gardner, 1952;Hammer, Gudykunst, & Wiseman, 1978). This learning is affected by internal and external factors including, among others, culture-specific knowledge about the new environment (Ward & Searle, 1991), language skills (Furnham, 1993) length and type of residence abroad (Ward, Okura, Kennedy, & Kojima, 1998) and social networks and friendships (Bochner, McLeod, & Lin, 1977). Finally, the "social identity and cognition" approach includes a number of aspects, such as the cognitive processes associated with perceived group and individual status differences (Tajfel, 1978), cultural maintenance and participation in the host society (Berry, 2006) and perceived discrimination (Ward & Leong, 2006).…”

Fear of the unknown: a pre-departure qualitative study of Turkish international students

“…Advocates of the culture learning approach, such as Furnham and Alibhai (1985), Ward et al (2001) and Cushner and Karim (2004) argue that stress can be managed and difficulties prepared for. Furnham (1993) rejects the psychological approach to the study of adjustment on the grounds that it stigmatises those who cannot cope, and Crano and Crano (1993) caution against the tendency to psychopathologise the international student experience, and to exaggerate the stress endured by students. Furthermore the generalisability of the experience of culture shock is questioned by many theorists of adjustment such as Martin and Harrell (2004), Gao and Gudykunst (1990) and Brown and Holloway (2008) who prefer to view transition as a unique and subjectively-lived experience that cannot be made to fit a prescriptive model of adjustment.…”

A consideration of the challenges involved in supervising international masters students

“…Thus academic difficulties may arise not just because of linguistic differences but due to a failure to understand or communicate at a cultural level. Culture shock is noted for its transitory nature (Searle and Ward, 1990;Furnham 1993): as the dissertation supervisor meets the Masters student more than halfway through the academic sojourn, one might expect that much academic dissonance will have dissipated. One might also expect that students have arrived at a functional level of academic fitness, since to progress to the dissertation stage, students need to have passed the taught component of the programme, and surely academic success is dependent on the assimilation of the norms of the academic culture (Blue 1993)? However, adjustment in some key areas of academic discourse has not always been made, and supervisors often have to deal with many problems that are specific to the international student 1 .…”