Writing Therapy

This article is taken from TEFLIN Journal Volume 20, Number 1 February 2009. It discusses the culture shock that experienced by foreign students during Dharmasiswa (a program that established by Indonesian government to give opportunity to learn Bahasa Indonesia) that they followed. The study focuses on culture shock both in academic and social life. The result of this study is not too surprisingly for me as Indonesian student. It shows the weakness of higher education system in our country. I feel quite same with the foreign student, especially for lack of academic atmosphere in Indonesian universities. By spreading open-ended questionnaire, the writer tries to discover the kinds of culture shock that foreign students found. In academic life, they feel shock with three things: teacher’s role and attitude, poorly organized program and local student’s attitude. They get stressful and difficulties to overcome with these conditions since they never find these in their home country....

This article discusses how often Indonesian native thank in their daily life compare with Australian. Timothy Hassal, the author, is Indonesian lecturer at Australian National University. In his trip to Indonesia years ago, he found that Indonesian sparing to thank. In this paper, he tries to discover his hypothesis. This also has purpose to increase cross-cultural communication between Indonesian and Australian, since many students from Indonesia study in Australia and also to help teaching of Indonesian in Australia’s school. Overall, this paper surprises me as an Indonesia. I never realize that we thank very seldom in our daily life interaction. Thanking for Australian is very common. It seems influenced by cultural values what Wierzbicka calls ‘superegalitarianism’. Australians think, people don’t need to serve or do something to the others to get verbal thanks. Different from Indonesian people, they will say “thank you” if they ask someone to something for them explicitly....