FROM THE INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION BARRIERS TO THE INTERCULTURAL ADAPTATION: INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION EXPERIENCES

Culture is one of the key factors of a person’s perception and interpretation of his/her surrounding environment. All values, norms, meanings and symbols of a society are put across through culture. Thus, culture remains at the core of interpersonal communication. Culture is closely related to an individual’s way of establishing and maintaining communication. Information related to culture are very important for communication to become meaningful. Within this context, it is quite possible that the individuals may run into stone walls in interpersonal communication due to the fact that they are not aware of the culture-specific elements. From initiating an interpersonal communication to the way of giving a meaning to verbal and non-verbal expressions, intercultural differences have many positive/negative effects on communication. While the international students enter into a different culture in that country, they also spend time with other students from all around the world in their classes / faculties. This requires adaptation to different cultures, in other words, intercultural learning. Otherwise, this inevitably leads to various problems regarding communication. From this viewpoint, this study aims to examine the intercultural communication problems and the intercultural communication experiences of international students in the process of intercultural adaptation. For this purpose, thematic analysis method is utilized through in-depth interviews with international students, who come from different countries to study in Turkey.