Psychological Barriers to Academic Adaptation of Students from Vietnam Studying in Russia

The present paper provides the results of empirical research on special aspects of psychological adaptation and self-management of students from Vietnam who study at Russian universities. The aim of the research was to find psychological barriers occurring during the process of their academic adaptation. The authors have prepared a questionnaire and polled 20 students from Vietnam who study at several Moscow universities. The analysis of the survey results proved that the Vietnamese students deal with specific psychological barriers to their academic adaptation. The authors determined five psychological barriers that directly impact personal growth and academic activity of foreign students: language barrier, low self-confidence, hope for an easy educational program, excessive optimism, low self-recovering. In addition, a comparative study was conducted on self-organization of Vietnamese and Russian students (17 and 20 people respectively). The authors used The Questionnaire on Self-Organization of Activity by E. Y. Mandarikova, which was based on Time Structure Questionnaire of M. J. Bond and N. T. Feather. The processing of results was performed with the use of methods of descriptive statistics and the Mann–Whitney U test. The analysis of the results allows concluding that the specificity of self-organization of Vietnamese students consists in the reduction of persistence in the event of strong fixation on a goal that is not adjusted for changing circumstances. It turned out that the common level of self-organization of activity among male students is higher than among female students.