ABSTRACT
Triple transitions (Jindal-Snape and Ingram, 2013) – the ‘culture and pedagogical shock’ (Zhou, Jindal-Snape, Topping, and Todman, 2008) encountered by international students who at the same time move to a new country into a new educational system and a new programme at a different degree level – have been described in a range of studies, specifically in the case of doctoral students and student sojourners (Jindal-Snape and Ingram, 2013; Ward, Bochner, and Furnham, 2001; Ward, Leong, and Low, 2004; Ward and Rana-Deuba, 2000; Zhou et al., 2008). The adaptation processes that international full-degree students need to undergo may be more challenging than those of other sojourners. At a very young age, these students move to a new country immediately after graduating from high school, practicing new languages, learning within new educational systems, living away from home for the first time, amongst a group of host-national students for whom transition to university might involve fewer obstacles. In this empirical study, we will investigate these adaptation processes of international full bachelor’s-degree students. We will do so within two complementary frameworks: that of cultural factors (Hofstede, 1986; Parrish and Linder-VanBerschot, 2010) and, in line with the studies just cited, that of the affective-behavioural-cognitive (ABC) model of acculturation. In these studies, the several facets of the ABC model (Ward, 2001; Ward et al., 2001; Zhou et al., 2008) are incorporated by complementing cognitive perspective, typically based on social identification theories, with a behavioural analysis based on the culture learning approach and affective aspects from the stress and coping framework. In our empirical study, we continue investigating the broad range of facets suggested by the ABC framework but now in the context of international full-degree students following a university bachelor’s programme. Given that most students are still adolescents, we expect the culture shock to be even greater than for such older students as sojourners or doctoral students, making their cultural adjustment a determining success factor.
