Culture shock around the world
Probably the most unexpected aspect of travelling abroad is culture shock. even when th eculture of the country you're travelling to is rather familiar to you, the chances still are that you are going to have a bit of a culture shock. And the less familiar the country is, the stronger the shock will be.
There are 4 stages(some people say there're 5) in any culture shock: the honeymoon stage, when you enjoy the difference and love every single moment of it. This stage normally lasts from several days to a couple of weeks, but then the excitement begins to subside. This is when the honeymoon stage gives way to rejection/withdrawal stage. What you loved at first - the different foods, the gestures, the customs - now begins to irritate you, because you now feel a bit like an outsider. The differences become more noticeable and less intriguing, whereas since you are not an insider, you are more likely to do something which will be offensive to insiders of the local culture or something which will be ineffective at best. This may lead to frustration and, in severe cases, a self-isolation from the frustrating experience.
If the rejcetion and misunderstanding is too strong, you can enter the next stage of the culture shock. At this stage (the depression and isolation stage) some people get so depressed that they decide to leave the country.
Fortunately, for those who do overcome the rejection stage, a new stage arrives sooner or later. This is the adjustment stage when you learn the intrinsic cultural issues and cease making blunders, and gradually begin to feel like at home in this new country. In a way it is a bit like the honeymoon stage because you enjoy the new culture again, but this time the enjoyment is not because the culture is new and different, but because you are becoming an insider, you do not make mistakes and you know your way about. Ideally, while teaching a foreign language AND culture we should be able to help our students learn to adjust, help them to see deeper and not judge a culture by only external, outward appearances, but rather understand why people do things in the way they do them.
When I was spending a year at an American university, I had excellent opportunities to observe culture shock and the adjustment process in different people. Since this was not my first time in the USA and I had had a lot of experience of daily communication with representatives of that culture, I was relatively free of culture shock. made quite a few friends among both the teachers and the students and could compare the first-time experience of my fellow-grantees without having to get distracted by myt own cultural struggles.
The two people I observed on a daily business was a young Russian woman from Uzbekistan and a young Azeri man from Azerbaidjan. To cut an otherwise long story short, I'll tell about the cultural shock and problems that the Azeri guy went through during that year. I will not name him to protect his provacy, though, and will refer to him as "the Azeri guy". Personally, we were friends and rented a flat together, but I have lost contact with him since that time and therefore cannot obtain his permission to give out his name in a comparative 'study".
1. Proxemics. The distance at which you stand from another person is culturally-dependent and differes in different countries. While Americans in smaller cities prefer to stand at least approximately 1.5 metres aways from each other while talking, the comfortable distance for Azeri guy was much shorter. He tried to stand closer, people would step back, so conversations often turned into a sort of a slow tango. Consequently, before he learned about distances and proxemics in general, Americans seemed very remote and cold to him. He, on the other hand, seemed to be constantly intruding on their personal space.
2. Dress code. Large university campuses are probably the most democratic and diverse places you can find when it comes to clothes. People wear what they like. I had a professor who is a big name in language testing, he used to wear shorts and a T-shirt to most of his classes, whereas some other professors would try to dress more elegantly than most of their students. An indispensable rule, however, is to wear something different every day, for example, if you're wearing jeans and a T-shirt one day, the next day you ought to wear a different T-shirt or different jeans/trousers/whatever. The Azeri guy, on the contrary, was used to dressing very conservatively and with little variation, so he wore the same suit and shirt for three or more days, although he did have enough other clothes.
3. Attitude to children. At a very early stage the Azeri guy was told to never touch other people's children. He was indignant, because in Azerbaidjan, according to him, when a man shows that he cares for children, it means that he is a sensitive and kind person. So in Azerbaidjan a man can pat someone else's child on the head or even give the child a kiss on the head, and this wins the man respect. In the USA such actions can lead to legal prosecution.
4. Visiting people. Once the Azeri guy was invited to an American family to Thanksgiving dinner. He asked me what would be a good present to take along, so I suggested he should take a bottle of wine or even some national dish that he could make himself so that the host family would be able to try something new and unusual. He made some dolma and when he returned, he was amazed and even shocked at how well the dish was received and how much attention was drawn to it. He explained to me, that in his country bringing food to other people's home can be taken as an insult to their hospitality, and if a man cooks something, this can be taken as an insult to his gender role.
The Azeri guy's honeymoon stage last for approximately two weeks, the frustration and adjustment stages took about 9 months and the "feeling at home" stage last only 2 months, which was way too short for such a long stay. At the end of the year he told me that he had only began enjoying himself and really learning something, because he had been struggling with culture shock all the time, seeing how people reacted in totally different ways from what he expected and how his best intentions were often misinterpreted.
Therefore I believe that having the potential culture shock in view while teaching, telling students how to overcome it can be an important part of language teaching and can help propel students' progress on their trips abroad, while culture shock can hamper it greatly. If you're interested, I could tell in more detail about some causes of culture shock in different cultures.
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