Psychological adaptation of the students in the new socio-cultural environment

The article is devoted to the study of social and psychological adaptation of foreign students to the educational process in Russian universities. The author attempts to analyze the factors affecting the success and duration of cross-cultural adaptation. The author concludes that a success of student’s adaptation to the new socio-cultural environment depends not so much on the time of stay in the country, as on personal characteristics of a respondent. The high level of adaptation is achieved through communicative competence, active life position, readiness to accept norms and rules of the new environment, positive attitude, belief in one’s own power. Successful adaptation is promoted not only by the development of social interaction skills, but also by their combination with an active process of reflection that leads to realization of one’s own behavior strategies and casual attribution.