You are too funny! Those may be the four stages of SOMETHING, but it's not acculturation.
The challenge of learning a new language and the
culture that goes with it is one that all LEP students face.
They require a period of adjustment to the new and baf-
fling ways of saying and doing things that they encounter
every day. Four successive stages that each student will
pass through on the road to acculturation have been iden-
tified:
1. Euphoria. During this initial phase the students will
experience a period of excitement over the newness
of the surroundings.
2. Culture Shock. This term refers to phenomena rang-
ing from mild irritability to deep psychological panic
and crisis. Culture shock is associated with the
learner’s feelings of estrangement, anger, hostility, in-
decision, frustration, unhappiness, sadness, loneliness,
homesickness, and even physical illness. Persons un-
dergoing culture shock view their new world with
resentment and alternate between being angry at oth-
ers for not understanding them and being filled with
self-pity.
3. Anomie. This is a stage of gradual—and at first ten-
tative and vacillating—recovery. This stage is typi-
fied by what is called “culture stress”: some problems
of acculturation are solved while others continue for
some time. As individuals begin to accept the differ-
ences in thinking and feeling that surround them,
they slowly become more empathic with other per-
sons in the second culture. Anomie might be de-
scribed as a feeling of homelessness, where one feels
neither bound firmly to one’s native culture nor fully
adapted to the second culture.
4. Assimilation or Adaptation. This fourth stage rep-
resents near or full recovery as shown by acceptance
of the new culture and self-confidence in the “new”
person who has developed in this culture.