Abstract
People who have to insert and adapt themselves to a different culture than the one where they grew up usually experience feelings related to anxiety and uncertainty. This is exactly the situation of the students who decide to go abroad to continue their education or make an internship in a foreign country. The number of these students has been constantly increasing during the last years. In order to better adapt themselves to the new culture they are confronted with the Anxiety/Uncertainty Model, states that they have to manage the levels of anxiety and uncertainty in order to communicate effectively with local students and teachers. According to the literature, an effective communication and intercultural adjustment of the foreign students has a direct impact on their academic performance. Therefore, it is a relevant task to support them in this process. This work introduces a geo-collaborative application called EMHC (for Exploring My Host Country) which run son mobile devices and allows exchange students to access contextual information as well as information about cultural behavior which could help them to manage their anxiety and uncertainty levels, thus improving their ability to adapt themselves to the new cultural environment. A preliminary evaluation of the EMHC was performed with a small number of exchange students of a Business School, obtaining encouraging results.
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This paper was partially funded by Fondecyt 1161200.
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Zurita, G., Baloian, N., Pino, J.A., Peñafiel, S. (2016). Support Communication and Intercultural Adjustment of Exchange Students Based on the AUM Theory. In: Yuizono, T., Ogata, H., Hoppe, U., Vassileva, J. (eds) Collaboration and Technology. CRIWG 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9848. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44799-5_5
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