Culture Shock Culture shock is a painful experience we go through when we encounter many new things in another country and w

Culture Shock
   Good morning. The topic for today’s lecture is culture shock.
   Culture shock is that ... experience, often a somewhat painful experience that we have when we go from our home country to another country, particularly for the first time that we’ve gone overseas. We grow up in our home culture, we are very, very familiar with it. Now suddenly as we get ready to go off to another country, we are going to encounter many new things. And we’ll react in some very strange ways. This is what we call culture shock.
   Let’s talk about some phases or stages of culture shock. I’m going to talk about five stages. The first one is sensory overload. When we first arrive in the new country, we are going to see many new things, new and different from what we are accustomed to. The landscape may look different, the building may look different, the people may look different, the, uh, the behaviour of people may look different, the vehicles that we see may be different, so many new things that kind of exciting to us, and we just take in a lot of new stimuli until we are just saturated with it after a couple of days. That’s what we call sensory overload.
   Another phase is one of helplessness. Before long, we are going to find that there are more and more things that we cannot do very easily, whether it’s, uh, uh, in shopping, or, are going to be areas where we’re going to feel helpless much like a child that’s learning about life, new things back in the home country, but need an adult to help him through it.
   We’re going to feel isolated, thirdly, at times when we can’t communicate effectively ... uh, we’re just not getting through to people, or maybe people aren’t caring enough about us or, we may think they aren’t caring enough about us, and we will feel isolated.
   Fourthly, we may become depressed at times, particularly at the time of holidays. That’s always a time that we want to feel good. We think about our family. We think about our friends. And here we are in a strange land. We don’t have our family and friends. And get depressed.
   And fifthly, one of the things that happens is that as we run into more and more obstacles, more and more frustrations in the new country, we start thinking about the old country where we came from and how good things were there, how smoothly everything went. OK, those are five of the phases, then, of culture shock.
   Now we’ll turn our attention to some areas of life that can cause culture shock. One of them is the arrival itself. When we arrive in the new country, we see so many new things. And that’s shocking to us. We’re not accustomed to it.
   Secondly, the greetings. We’re accustomed to certain greetings in our home land. For example, we may have the expression that says something like "How much money do you make?" very common expression. But suddenly if you use the same expression for a greeting in the new country, we may get a very negative response, because a person may think we are prying into their personal business. And we’re shocked by that. We don’t expect it, don’t understand it.
   Thirdly, we notice that physical contact in the new land may be quite different. We may be shocked to find that in the new country, women and men have much more physical contact with each other in public than we’re accustomed to, and we’re shocked by it. This adds more to our culture shock.
   Fourthly, we may find that people require more or less personal space between them than we’re accustomed to. We may find that as we’re talking with somebody that person will be backing away from us as we’re talking. Or, a person may be moving in on you, towards you, and you don’t understand why. That can be a shock to the system as well.
   Fifthly, the area of language. It’s going to be a difficult one, if you are in a country that speaks a different language. You are struggling to learn more words to understand, particularly in the classroom, you’re trying hard to get the information so you can pass the test and you have an instructor that just keeps, uh, speaking in a very rapid rate, so you have a particularly hard time, very frustrating, which adds again to the culture shock.
   Finally, the area of life that can cause culture shock is the area of foods. Food is a very emotional part of our life. We are familiar with certain goods that are our favorites and now we are in a new land, where our foods may be not available, or they’re prepared differently. Again, very shocking to us.
   So, what we experience in a new country may be painful for the time being. But after we have gone through this process, we will find we have learned many things, and have achieved a kind of flexibility. Now, we can feel at home anywhere in the world. Thank you very much.