Chinese Graduate Students' Adaptation to Learning in America: A Cultural Perspective

Introduction

It has been a common phenomenon for large numbers of foreign students to study on campus in American universities. Chinese students from the People's Republic of China make up one of the largest groups among these foreign students. In 2004/2005, there were 62,523 students from China¹ who were the second largest group among the 565,039 foreign students in the US (Institute of International Education, NY 2005). Over the last five years, the number of Chinese students in the US has grown by 15 percent. In spring 2006, there were 1,211 foreign students from 106 countries studying at the University in Midwest America where this study took place.² Of the 248 Chinese students who made up the largest group from any single country, 233 were graduate students and 15 were undergraduate students (International Affairs Office, the University 2006).

Students from different cultures have come to the US with experiences of different teaching/learning systems in their home countries. Studies that have been carried out on foreign students suggest that their adaptation to teaching and learning in a host country tends to depend on the similarity between the foreign student's cultural background and the culture of the host country. Several cross-cultural studies have indicated that American culture and Chinese culture represent two extremes in the cultural continuum, in light of the identified dimensions of culture (Hofstede 1997; Hofstede and Bond 1999). Because of considerable cultural differences, the transition from learning in the Chinese academic setting to the American academic setting may present great difficulties for newly-arrived Chinese students.

The aim of the present study is to describe the differences between the American and the Chinese teaching and learning processes as experienced by the newly-arrived Chinese graduate students and the ways they handled those differences.

Literature Review

Culture has been defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another" (Hofstede 1997: 260). Although almost everyone belongs to a number of different groups and categories of people at the same time, nations are "the source of a considerable amount of common mental programming of their citizens" (Hofstede 1997: 12), and national cultural differences are one of the areas that interests social scientists most. In 1954, two Americans, sociologist Alex Inkeles and psychologist Daniel Levinson, suggested that the following qualify as indicators of individual behavior across cultures:

1. 1. Relation to authority.

2. 2. Conception of self, in particular (a) the relationship between individual and society, and (b) the individual's concept of masculinity and femininity.

3. 3. Ways of dealing with conflicts, including the control of aggression and the expression of feelings (Hofstede as cited in Inkeles and Levinson 1969: 447).

These four common indicators were empirically found in Hofstede's study of a large body of survey data about the values held by people in over 50 countries around the world. They were named by Hofstede as "power distance" (ranging from small to large), "collectivism versus individualism," "femininity versus masculinity," and "uncertainty avoidance" (ranging from weak to strong). A fifth dimension of differences among national cultures was identified as "long-term orientation" in life versus "short-term orientation." The findings of Hofstede's study pertaining to Chinese and American cultures were (a) Chinese culture as reflected by subjects from Hong Kong and Taiwan was characterized by low individualism, large power distance, strong uncertainty avoidance, femininity, and long-term orientation; (b) American culture was characterized by high individualism, small power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and short-term orientation. Hofstede asserted that, if a bipolar continuum was drawn on the five culture dimensions, Chinese culture and American culture would be located at the opposite poles of the continuum (Hofstede 1997).

National cultural differences are reflected in schools. According to Hofstede (1997), "different value patterns in the cultures from which the teacher and the students have come are one source of the problem. They [the national cultural differences] usually affect the relationships between teacher and students, among students, and between...