According to a recent global education report, Chinese overseas students are the largest group among international students in most countries. As the US 2013 Open Doors report mentioned, “The growth of international students’ number is largely driven by students from China. The enrolments of Chinese student soar by 21 percent in total and reach almost 235,000 students, while those of other countries only take less than 5 percent of the total.” With more and more Chinese students going abroad, some inconspicuous cross-cultural problems emerge. Not only do these problems disturb the students’ families and the students themselves, but also pose some unnecessary trouble for host universities and culture in general. Recently, those problems have become much more serious due to the fact that most of overseas students who were born after 1980 under the Chinese “one-child policy” always assume self-central thinking style.
Nowadays, there are more and more training programs in China, offered by home universities, host universities, and even some special training institutions, aimed at improving students’ understanding of the new culture and helping them adapt to the new environment more easily and quickly. More and more literary sources are focused on setting up effective cross-cultural training courses to assist outsiders in adapting to the oversea environment more smoothly. But the nature of these training programs is that they have to cater to the needs of overseas students and allow for the cultural background of host universities and countries (Hodgetts & Luthans 2000; Hutchings 2005). Because that kind of training programs is generally intensive and only provides surface knowledge, there is only little improvement observed in students after taking that kind of training. The most important point to be taken is how to gain knowledge about a new culture rather than superficial content. Having the habit of self-educating is very important for students who stay aboard and adapt to a new social environment. And the increasing emphasis on the students learning style could promote students’ practical adaption, especially in the case of Chinese students, most of whom develop their basic knowledge through self-study in high school under high pressure from the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), and they first gain their social knowledge in their college life, so, from the phenomenon noted above, we could infer that the importance of effective learning style has been neglected by cross-cultural practitioners.