Intercultural Adaptation and Acculturation Strategies of Overseas Chinese Teachers — A Survey Study on Volunteer CPKI Chinese Teachers of 2019-2020 Term in South Korea

Abstract

With the increasing demand for native Chinese teachers from all over the world, more and more Chinese teachers are going abroad. As the intercultural adaptation and adaptation strategies of these teachers directly impact the promotion of overseas Chinese education, this survey study explored the intercultural adaptation and adaptation strategies of a sample of 170 CPIK (Chinese Program In Korea) volunteer Chinese teachers of 2019-2020 term in South Korea by the approaches of interview, questionnaire and statistical analysis.<BR> Drawing upon the Integrative Theory of Cross-cultural Adaptation (Kim, 2005) and the Theory of Acculturation Strategies （Berry, 1992), this paper developed 3 questionnaires and initiated an online automatic assessment system to implement the investigation. By applying statistical software such as SPSS23.0 and AMOS 24.0, quantitative analyses were explored and findings revealed that the overall intercultural adaptation of CPIK Chinese teachers was pretty good and the group with male gender, higher education background and higher Korean proficiency evidently achieved better intercultural adaptation. Among the 7 scopes of intercultural adaptation, the Chinese teachers generally performed best in the scope of Ethic Social Communication, while performing worst in the scope of Host Social Communication. The levels of Host Social Communication and Teaching Adaptation were positively related to the status of intercultural adaptation，and the Predisposition could predict whether or not the Intercultural Transformation could be achieved. The Chinese teachers showed an evident preference to integration strategy followed by separation strategy, and those who had integration strategy preference performed best in intercultural adaptation. The findings can not only provide empirical evidence for how to improve CPIK Chinese teachers’ cross-cultural adaptability, but also offer the potential professional value for helping to train overseas Chinese teachers conveniently on a large-scale service by the online automatic assessment system developed by this research.