Background Research 1

Thought Leadership（Include two parts: Eastern And Western Cultures/study abroad）

Eastern And Western Cultures

Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Written by Nisbett, Richard E.; Peng, Kaiping; Choi, Incheol; Norenzayan, Ara

“The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior……The authors speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems.”

East Meets West. Written by Liu, Yang, a Chinese designer lives in German. This series of works has been invited to exhibit at the German Foreign Ministry. In these works, red represents Chinese and blue represents Germany.

Treat kids

Study Abroad

Celeste Kinginger is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is involved in the education of language learners, teachers, and researchers. She is the author of Language Learning in Study Abroad: A Critical Reading of Research (Palgrave Macmillan) and of numerous other publications on related topics.

Language learning is an essential component of education abroad.

Marketing pressure affects study abroad programs.

Fostering optimal articulation between the U.S. target language curriculum and the host language programs outside the U.S.

Non-Governmental Organisations

A list of Common and famous NGO

ISEP

ACSE

CIEE

Cultural Homestay International

American Homestay Services

ISM-International Student Ministry

International Student

Massachusetts Service Alliance

United States SERVAS

AHN-USA

FOCUS (a Christian organization)

ANDEO

Global Student Services

Homestay in LA

International Student Placements

IHPS Homestays

Regency West Company

Student International Housing Inc. (S.I.H.)

Universal Student Housing

Study in the U.S.A.

GlobalPittsburgh

FIUTS

GLOBE NEWSWIRE

American Homestay Network

HomestayWeb

Information they provide

CIEE-Founded in 1947, CIEE is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to quality exchange and global learning opportunities. Every host family can claim a flat $50 per month tax deduction as an American host family for the coming tax year. Exchange students only pay food and transportation fee to the host families.

ACES-American Homestay Services and American Homestay Network. Most of them have local coordinators. They work with four diverse communities-host families, exchange students, their local community and host schools. One of their responsibilities is supervising program participants and assisting with issues as they arise.

Most homestay service websites don’t provide any help after the students and the host family getting touched. Homestay Finder is one of the popular websites to help host families and students looking for a homestay to meet each other. Although Homestay Finder gives many tips for host families, like how to communicate with the guest, it does not provide any help after students staying with host families. It claimed, “if you are a host family or a person looking for homestay, it is your work to ensure that the counterpart fits your expectations. It is your own job to mitigate any risks.”

Another two popular homestay websites, Homestay Web and Homestay Booking, also have the similar claims. None of those websites is liable if the service provider does not fulfill its duties derived from its terms of use or if the guest is not satisfied with the service provider’s performance for any other reason.

Academic Research

Asian International Student Transition to High School in Canada

Natalee Popadiuk, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B. C., Canada

Many secondary school counsellors wonder how to best support international students from Asian countries. Unfortunately, there is a lack of academic literature that addresses unaccompanied minors studying in Canada and the United States (Leung, 2001)

They found that adolescent international students were a vulnerable group who were often not prepared in advance of their sojourn and who had difficulties adapting to the new country (Kuo & Roysircar, 2006). The students reported that they suffered from a lack of information about the host culture, as well as having little sense about the purpose of their sojourn, which added to the already difficult task of adjusting to a new cultural reality.

First, international students from Asia often hold negative perspectives of mental health problems, believe that family and close friends are in the best position to offer help, and generally do not understand the largely Western view of counselling services.

Secondly, school counsellors often do not possess the level of cultural competency needed to work effectively with international students from Asia.

International Education: Homestay Theory Versus Practice

K. Richardson

Homestay provides a unique family environment where different cultures intercept within the home. While homestay appears to be ideal, in practice there is uncertainty about the extent to which it fulfils the expectations of students, hosts and organisations alike.

Questions regarding the adequacy of training provided for homestay providers and hosts have also emerged. The issues arising in the unique environment of the homestay, such as cultural tensions, need to be addressed.

Written Sources

CHINA .ORG.CN

According to Larry Guo, director of Golden Source agency, 20 to 30 percent of students who find homestay families through the agency are dissatisfied with their host families. They encourage the students to communicate with the host family first.

HOMESTAY HIGHLIGHTS AND HURDLES, 1998 ESL MAGAZINE

Homestay - international students living with North American families - is a recipe for a wide range of experiences: culture shock, joyous relationships, miscommunication and intercultural learning.

Host family check: Home interview and inspection of the student’s room and the rest of the home. Criminal background.

Increasingly, homestay coordinators are asking families to provide evidence from the local police that they do not have a criminal record. The students invariably experience culture shock. Asian students, whose culture is so different from ours, often suffer most acutely.

The food was shocking. The differences between their home country and North America can be quite striking. Usually, participants get their image of American families from television or the movies and expect their host family to conform to that. Often, students come expecting that families will be able to spend endless amounts of time helping them with their English and explaining how North American society functions. They get a shock. Other common issues include:

Smoking; Dog picture Family pets; Courtesy;

Books

Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad, 4th Edition, 2011

Blue book of global talent 2013

In 2011-2012 Academic year, the U.S. has 6,932 Asian minors under 18 years of age who studied in America, and the number increased 16% over the previous year. More than 50% of those students chose to live with host families. The number is still increasing. However, 20% to 30% of students are dissatisfied with their host families because of privacy, food or other factors.