The research team, led by Sevda Dolapcioglu with Yunus Emre Akbana, İlayda Uzun, and Gülten Koşar, used an exploratory qualitative design to capture the students’ experiences. Data were collected through a seven-item open-ended written questionnaire administered to 15 middle-school students who had received several years of formal schooling in Türkiye. The researchers then applied qualitative content analysis to identify recurring themes across the responses. This approach allowed the team to examine how returnee students experience the linguistic, academic, social, and psychosocial dimensions of re-entering an education system taught in a language they may read and speak at home but have rarely used for academic work.

One of the study’s central insights concerns the nature of bilingual development in displacement. Children who attend school in a host country typically develop strong conversational skills in the host language while their literacy in the home language may stagnate or develop unevenly. For Syrian students in Türkiye, this meant that everyday Turkish could be fluent while academic Arabic, the register required for science, mathematics, literature, and formal writing, remained underdeveloped. When these students returned to Syria, they faced textbooks, teacher explanations, and examinations conducted almost entirely in formal Arabic. The gap between conversational competence and academic language proficiency, a distinction long recognized in bilingual education research, became the central obstacle to their reintegration.

The content analysis revealed that the students’ struggles extended well beyond vocabulary. Participants reported difficulty with conceptual transfer, the process of carrying ideas and subject knowledge learned in one language of instruction into another. A student who understood a mathematical procedure in Turkish, for example, might struggle to name its components, follow an Arabic explanation, or reproduce the reasoning in written Arabic. Written production emerged as a particularly acute challenge, since formal Arabic demands different orthographic, grammatical, and rhetorical conventions than spoken dialects. The students also described in-class assessment practices that felt unfamiliar and, in their perception, unclear, compounding the sense that their prior learning did not translate directly into success in the new system.

Crucially, the study argues that these difficulties cannot be attributed to individual deficits alone. The researchers found that the students’ challenges were shaped by a web of structural factors: uneven Arabic literacy development, curriculum misalignment between the Turkish and Syrian systems, pedagogical practices that participants perceived as more teacher-directed than the instruction they had experienced in Türkiye, limited peer interaction in the new classrooms, and assessment practices that students found hard to interpret. In other words, the mismatch was systemic. The curriculum, the teaching style, the social dynamics, and the evaluation methods all changed at once, and no bridging mechanism existed to help students navigate the transition.

The psychosocial dimension added another layer of complexity. Participants described re-migration-related distress, difficulty concentrating in class, and increased family responsibilities that competed with their studies. Return migration, even when voluntary and long-awaited, is itself a stressful life event. Families often return to communities that have changed, to homes that may be damaged, and to economic uncertainty. For adolescents, these pressures arrive at precisely the moment when academic demands intensify. The study’s findings indicate that psychosocial strain and academic struggle reinforce each other, making it harder for students to engage with the very linguistic and curricular challenges they face.

By conceptualizing return as a distinct educational phase, the researchers contribute to broader discourses on refugee education and bilingualism. Most existing research examines refugee students’ adaptation in host countries, following their progress as they learn a new language and adjust to a new curriculum. The reintegration phase after voluntary return has remained underexplored, and this study helps fill that gap. The Turkish case is significant because Türkiye hosted one of the largest Syrian refugee populations in the world, and hundreds of thousands of students passed through Turkish schools. As returns accelerate, the question of how these children re-enter Arabic-medium schooling becomes a matter of educational policy with implications far beyond a single border.

The implications the authors draw are concrete. They underscore the critical need for academic Arabic bridging programs that explicitly target the register of schooling rather than everyday conversation. They call for background-sensitive assessment frameworks that take a student’s prior schooling into account rather than measuring them against peers who never left the system. They advocate psychosocially responsive pedagogies that recognize the emotional weight of return, and school-based psychosocial support services that address distress before it undermines learning. Each recommendation follows directly from the themes that emerged in the content analysis, giving the findings practical weight for ministries, schools, and teachers working with returnee populations.

For the international education community, the study reframes a common narrative. The story of refugee education is usually told as a one-way journey of integration into a host society. This research shows that the return leg of that journey deserves equal attention, and that linguistic recovery is not automatic simply because a child is going back to a country where the official language matches their heritage. Academic language is learned in classrooms, through sustained instruction and literacy practice, and years spent in another language of instruction create real gaps that persist after the return flight lands. Recognizing return as its own educational transition, with its own pedagogical demands, is the first step toward designing support that actually works.

The study also carries a message about how educational systems measure success. When a returnee student underperforms on an Arabic examination, the easy interpretation is that the student failed to keep up. The evidence from this research points in the opposite direction: the students arrived with valuable multilingual resources and prior academic knowledge, but the receiving system offered no structured pathway for those assets to transfer. The struggles documented here reflect institutional and contextual mismatches rather than individual shortcomings. As voluntary returns continue, the researchers’ call for bridging programs, sensitive assessment, and psychosocial support offers a blueprint for turning a hidden challenge into a manageable transition, one classroom at a time.

Subject of Research: Linguistic and academic re-adaptation of Syrian returnee students to Arabic-medium schooling after voluntary return from Türkiye

Article Title: The hidden challenges of return migration: Linguistic and academic re-adaptation of Syrian students to the Arabic Education System

Article References: Dolapcioglu, S., Akbana, Y. E., Uzun, İ., & Koşar, G. (2026). The hidden challenges of return migration: Linguistic and academic re-adaptation of Syrian students to the Arabic Education System. PLOS One, 21(10), e0361042. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0361042

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361042

Keywords: return migration, Syrian students, refugee education, academic Arabic, bilingualism, Türkiye, PLOS One, qualitative study, educational reintegration, psychosocial support, curriculum misalignment, language proficiency

The research, conducted by Xiao Wang of the University of Macau, Fengshi Ren and Ruining Jin of Beijing University of Technology, Yongqi Xu of Minzu University of China, and Jie Wei of Guangxi University and China University of Political Science and Law, examined Chinese international students who had developed a pro-host-nation cultural identity during their time abroad. These are students who, by conventional measures of acculturation, succeeded: they adopted the values, social styles, and everyday practices of their host societies, often feeling more at home in Melbourne, Toronto, or London than they had in Beijing or Chengdu. Yet the study reveals that their trajectories of departure, adaptation, return, and reentry cannot be understood without reference to Confucian values, pragmatism, and the pressures of contemporary individualization in Chinese society.

The team carried out in-depth interviews with 14 Chinese international student returnees, tracing how each participant moved through the full cycle of transnational mobility: the motivations that pushed them overseas, the acculturation strategies they adopted while abroad, the identity shifts they experienced, the calculations that eventually brought them home, and the challenges they faced when they tried to reintegrate into Chinese society. The study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of China University of Political Science and Law, with written informed consent obtained from all participants, who were assured anonymity through the use of pseudonyms and were offered mental health resources given the potentially sensitive nature of the topics discussed.

Acculturation research has long treated adaptation as a relatively linear process. Classic models, most famously John Berry’s fourfold framework, describe how migrants can integrate, assimilate, separate, or marginalize depending on whether they maintain their heritage culture and engage with the host culture. Return migration, when it is studied at all, is often framed as a simple reversal: the returnee readjusts to a familiar home culture. The new study complicates this picture substantially. Its central finding is that traditional hierarchical and pragmatic values can simultaneously prompt cultural alienation and the pursuit of autonomy abroad, while also shaping the motivations that drive students to return and the difficulties they encounter once they arrive back.

This dual role of tradition is the study’s most striking insight. Confucian norms emphasize hierarchy, family obligation, and the pursuit of achievement as a form of filial devotion. For some participants, these same norms generated a sense of alienation from Chinese social life, with its intense competition, rigid social ladders, and expectations of deference. Studying abroad offered an escape route, a chance to experience societies perceived as more egalitarian and to pursue personal autonomy that felt constrained at home. In other words, the desire to leave was not simply a pull toward the West but a push away from a normative order that these students found suffocating, even as that order had shaped their ambitions in the first place.

Yet the story does not end with liberation overseas. The pragmatic strand of Chinese cultural tradition, which treats education and mobility as instruments for family advancement and long-term security, reasserted itself in the decision to return. Career prospects, aging parents, and the sense that one’s ultimate obligations lay back home combined to draw even the most enthusiastically assimilated students back to China. The return was thus not a failure of adaptation but, in many cases, an expression of the same traditional values that had motivated the original departure. Tradition, the study suggests, operates on both ends of the migration arc, pulling students out and drawing them back.

The reacculturation phase proved to be the most painful. Students who had internalized host-nation norms of directness, individual choice, and flatter social hierarchies returned to workplaces and family structures that operated by very different rules. Their pro-host-nation identity, once an asset abroad, became a liability at home, marking them as different, sometimes as arrogant, sometimes as naive. The mirage of belonging in the study’s title captures this experience: the returnees discovered that the home they remembered no longer matched the home they re-entered, and that their years abroad had transformed them in ways that Chinese society was not always prepared to accommodate. Belonging, which had felt achievable overseas, remained elusive on both sides of the Pacific.

The study also situates these individual experiences within a broader sociological transformation. Contemporary Chinese society is characterized by increasing individualization, a process in which personal choice and self-development have gained legitimacy even within a collectivist framework. The returnees in this study were not simply caught between two static cultures; they were navigating a Chinese society that is itself in flux, where traditional norms coexist with, and are renegotiated by, individualized aspirations. This dynamic helps explain why the participants’ identities did not settle into any of the neat categories offered by classical acculturation theory. Their sense of self remained multi-dimensional, shifting with context and life stage rather than converging on a single cultural orientation.

Methodologically, the research demonstrates the value of qualitative depth in a field dominated by large-scale surveys. Fourteen interviews cannot establish prevalence, but they can illuminate mechanisms, and here the mechanism is clear: traditional norms are not a fixed baseline that migrants shed or retain, but an active force that shapes motivation, adaptation, and reentry at every stage. The authors argue that this finding calls for more nuanced, multi-dimensional models of acculturation and reacculturation, models that treat culture as a dynamic resource rather than a static inventory of traits, and that follow migrants across the entire transnational circuit rather than studying departure and return in isolation.

The implications extend well beyond academia. Universities that recruit Chinese students invest heavily in supporting their adaptation abroad but rarely think about their reentry. Employers in China hiring returnees, and families welcoming them home, may misread the friction these graduates experience as personal failing rather than a predictable outcome of deep cultural negotiation. As international student mobility continues at massive scale, and as geopolitical tensions complicate the calculus of studying abroad, understanding why students leave, why they come back, and why coming back can feel like arriving in a foreign country has never been more relevant. The greener grass, this research suggests, was never really the point; the point was the long, tradition-laden journey between two versions of home.

Subject of Research: The influence of traditional Chinese sociocultural norms on the identity and reacculturation of Chinese international student returnees

Article Title: Greener grass or the mirage of belonging: How Chinese traditional norms impact the identity and (re)acculturation of Chinese international students

Article References: Wang, X., Ren, F., Xu, Y., Wei, J., & Jin, R. (2026). Greener grass or the mirage of belonging: How Chinese traditional norms impact the identity and (re)acculturation of Chinese international students. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09223-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09223-3

Keywords: acculturation, Chinese international students, Confucian values, return migration, cultural identity, reacculturation, individualization, qualitative interviews, transnational mobility, cultural alienation, pragmatism, belonging

The research team, led by Maia Mestvirishvili of the Psychology Department at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University together with Natia Mestvirishvili, Mariam Kvitsiani and Tamar Kamushadze, conducted 23 in-depth interviews with Georgian return migrants, 12 women and 11 men, and analyzed the transcripts using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a method designed to reconstruct how individuals subjectively experience major life transitions. Rather than measuring adaptation with survey scales, the approach lets the interviewees’ own accounts of readjustment, belonging and friction with home culture drive the analysis, revealing patterns in how values, gender roles and identities are transferred, negotiated and sometimes defended after remigration.

Theoretically, the study leans on two complementary frameworks. The first is the Cultural Identity Model developed by Nancy Sussman, which describes the cultural transition cycle of sojourners and predicts that returnees will exhibit distinct identity outcomes, including additive identities that incorporate elements of the host culture, subtractive identities in which internal change is preserved but connection to the home society weakens, and other configurations shaped by the meaning the sojourn assigned to the time abroad. The second is proculturation, a concept introduced by Vladimer Gamsakhurdia that reframes adaptation as a dialogical process: instead of merely acculturating to a new culture, migrants actively carry values between cultures and renegotiate their home identity in light of what they absorbed abroad. Applied to the post-return period, proculturation captures the push and pull between Georgianness and the Western norms many returnees encountered during their time overseas.

From the interview material, the researchers distilled three scenarios that capture the range of readaptation trajectories. The first, which they call sustaining changes after remigration, corresponds to the additive identity type in the Cultural Identity Model. These returnees came home as self-conscious change agents. They integrated values acquired in the host country into their everyday lives in Georgia and actively promoted them in their families, workplaces and social circles. For this group, the changes experienced abroad were not an inconvenient residue of life elsewhere but a resource to be deployed at home, a way of improving practices and expectations in their immediate environment while remaining embedded in Georgian society.

The second scenario, labeled resistant versus receptive, reflects the subtractive identity pattern. These returnees preserved the internal transformations they had undergone abroad, in their values, habits and expectations, but struggled to reconnect with the home society around them. The gap between the self that returned and the culture that received it produced persistent friction: the returnees felt the society was resistant to the changes they carried, while they themselves remained receptive to the norms they had adopted overseas. The result is a form of readaptation stress in which the migrant is physically home but psychologically partly elsewhere, unable to fuse the two versions of the self into a workable whole.

The third scenario, the fusion of values, represents a more flexible variant of the additive identity. Here returnees selectively and situationally embraced elements of the host culture, adopting some practices in some contexts while retaining traditional ones in others, and negotiated a balance between traditional and modern values. Rather than championing wholesale change or retreating into alienation, these migrants behaved as cultural bricoleurs, assembling a working identity from both repertoires depending on the demands of the situation. The researchers present this fusion as a distinct strategy of proculturation, one in which the negotiation between Georgianness and Westernness becomes an ongoing, context-sensitive balancing act rather than a one-time choice.

Underlying all three scenarios is a set of concrete negotiation sites, and among the most consequential are gender roles. The study situates itself within a substantial body of evidence showing that migration can transfer norms: research on Turkey, Mali, the Middle East and elsewhere has linked migration experiences to shifts in women’s empowerment, political participation and family dynamics. The Georgian interviews show that returnees bring these negotiated gender expectations home with them, and that how they handle the collision between transformed expectations and traditional domestic arrangements is a central component of readaptation. For some, promoting more egalitarian roles becomes part of the change-agent scenario; for others, the mismatch feeds the disconnection characteristic of the resistant-versus-receptive pattern.

The Georgian context gives these findings particular weight. Georgia has one of the higher emigration rates in its region, and the country’s Migration Strategy for 2021 to 2030 explicitly frames return and reintegration as policy priorities. Yet, as the authors note, existing studies tend to concentrate on the psycho-emotional challenges and identity reconstruction that occur during migration itself, while the readaptation stress and identity clashes of the post-return phase remain underexplored. By documenting three distinct reintegration trajectories in a single national context, the study supplies policymakers and support services with a more granular picture of who struggles after return, why, and in what ways, information that could shape reintegration programs that currently treat returnees as a homogeneous group.

Methodologically, the study is careful about scope. Interpretative phenomenological analysis with 23 participants is designed for depth, not statistical generalization, and the authors are transparent that the three scenarios are analytic ideal types distilled from lived accounts rather than population-level categories. The research received ethical clearance from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Psychological and Educational Sciences at Tbilisi State University, and the interview data are available on request from the corresponding author, with public release restricted to protect participant privacy. The authors declare no competing interests, and the work was conducted in accordance with institutional and international ethical standards for research with human participants.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing of what coming home means. Return migration has often been treated in both research and public discourse as the end of the migration story, a homecoming that closes the loop. This research suggests instead that return is a second cultural transition, complete with its own identity dynamics, negotiation of values and potential for both personal strain and social change. Returnees, the findings imply, are not simply migrants going backward; they are carriers of transformed values whose reintegration can either enrich their home societies, as in the change-agent and fusion scenarios, or leave them stranded between worlds, as in the resistant-versus-receptive pattern. For a country like Georgia, where labor migration and return are demographic constants, recognizing returnees as agents of cultural negotiation rather than passive reentrants may be the study’s most actionable insight, and a reminder that the hardest border a migrant crosses is often the one leading back home.

Subject of Research: Identity readaptation and proculturation among Georgian return migrants

Article Title: Re-Adaptation with Home Culture: A Qualitative Study of Return Migrants in Georgia

Article References: Mestvirishvili, M., Mestvirishvili, N., Kvitsiani, M., & Kamushadze, T. (2025). Re-Adaptation with Home Culture: A Qualitative Study of Return Migrants in Georgia. Trends in Psychology, 34(1), 442-464. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00505-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00505-4

Keywords: return migration, readaptation, cultural identity, proculturation, Georgia, interpretative phenomenological analysis, gender roles, identity negotiation, Cultural Identity Model, reintegration, cultural psychology, migration studies