rship or more job opportunities. What are their motivations and reasons to study in HK leaving their loved homeland and sojourning in another alien culture. Some students can well adapt to the new environment, while, others always experience emotional upheavals and psychological confusions. What are the difficulties and barriers of their intercultural adaptation? Additionally, how does the current academic restructuring of HK’s universities affect their adaptation? Does the current academic restructuring benefit those students more or bring them much harder intercultural adaptation difficulties? Therefore, the complex experiences of mainland students in HK and the influence of the new academic structure come into being the original rational and fundamental motivation for the author to undertake a study about intercultural adaptation of mainland Chinese students in HK. Finally, the author hopes to find out the efficient ways to improve their adaptation ability through EFL Teaching and Culture Training.
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2 Literature Review and Theoretical Considerations
2.1 Relevant Concepts
Mainland Chinese students in HK’s universities can be conceptualized and delineated into the following two categories. The first category is domestic student sojourners. “Sojourn”, the root of “Sojourner”, is defined in the dictionary as “a temporary stay or residence at a place and offers various synonyms: a delay or digression; to tarry, lodge, rest, or quarter” (Furnham, 1987, p.42). When we want to describe individuals who sojourn in alien cultural environments, the word “sojourner” is usually used to denote those travelers who move into new cultural contexts for a limited period of time which lasts six months to five years, and for some specific goals. They are the people who have freedom and the means to travel (Berry, 2006; Furnham, 1987). Large quantities of people may be classified as sojourners, including international students who go abroad to study and business people who go abroad to work for a specific period of time, technical assistance workers, corporate personnel, missionaries and so on. Some domestic sojourners move from one region to another within their own country for a limited period of time to attend school or work. n this sense, domestic sojourners can be used to denote mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, for HK is just one of the Special Administrative Regions along with Macao attached to the whole domain of China. They also have the following characteristics: First, they are now studying in Hong Kong for a limited period of time. Thus, this study leaves out those students who get degree by home teaching without having firsthand and continuous communication with that host culture. Second, they go there voluntarily mainly in pursuit of further studies. As