Dec 10, '07 8:26 PM for everyone

Am I Normal?: A Personal Quest That Leads to Academic and

Professional Achievement

An essay by : Harwintha Yuhria Anjarningsih

Sex : Female

Age : 26

Country : Indonesia

Master course completed : European Masters in Clinical Linguistics

Telephone numbers : +62 21 778 30 310 (home)

+62 21 786 83 87 (office)

+62 813 995 61 852 (mobile phone)

E-mail address : wintha_salyo@yahoo.com

harwintha@ui.edu

I had always thought that I was special. Not special in a unique way but special that is equivalent to being very unfortunate. I had never considered that I had a happy childhood. My parents' conflicts with each other left me feeling that I was not wanted and at one point in my life I thought that I was disabled in a way, much to my own distaste. Emotionally perhaps because I enjoyed being alone just accompanied by my books and imagination. Friends were not number one in my list of priorities.

I started my professional life when I was in the second year of my undergraduate program. I started by teaching English to children. I had taught children and adults for three years before my unconsciousness started bugging me. I could not help thinking that I needed help to fix myself and to help others like me. I wanted to know whether I was normal. Did I have autism? Emotional disorders? Or what? That was when I started reading about emotional disorders in general and joined a mailing list of parents who had children with autism. That was when my personal quest to prove that I was normal unofficially began.

At the same time, the university where I was (and still is) working for, the University of Indonesia, demanded that all lecturers have at least a masters degree if they wanted to continue working. Knowing that I had had some experience in teaching and was very enthusiastic to continue my career at the university, many colleagues encouraged me to take a specialization in Teaching English as A Foreign Language. I even applied for a scholarship to study at a university in Australia to specialize in computer assisted learning. But God knew I did not belong there. The application was rejected.

By sheer luck, I heard about scholarships offered by the German government to Indonesian people who wanted to continue to graduate programs. By sheer luck again, the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst/ The German Academic Exchange Service) linked me to the European Masters in Clinical Linguistics' website after I wrote to them that I was a linguist and was interested in disorders. I could not believe I finally found what I had been looking for when I was told that I got the Erasmus Mundus grant. The quest was officially began.

Now, a year after I finished my masters course, I do not regret my decision to come back to Indonesia. I signed what we at the University of Indonesia usually calls as "2n+1" which means we agree to teach at the university for twice the time we spend for studying plus one more year. In my case, it means three and a half years. Why is this so? After finishing the EMCL, especially after taking a course on speech development in autistic children, I realized that I was normal and that I needed to go back to Indonesia to help people with language disorders. I knew from the start that I would need a base to establish what I wanted to do: doing research and practical work.

To secure my ambition to become a researcher in clinical linguistics, now I am applying to become an employee of the University of Indonesia. The Master of Science degree that I got from the EMCL has enabled me to progress from being an employee of the Faculty of Humanities to being an employee of the University of Indonesia. The new status will enable to choose one of three options: being a full researcher, being a full lecturer, and being a part time researcher and lecturer. I think I will choose the last option because I still want to teach. By doing that I assume that I can share what I get from my research and gather ideas from students that I may use in my later research.

The EMCL has equipped me with what I need to progress as a researcher and lecturer: knowledge in clinical linguistics and research skills needed. I am very proud that I am one of the rare people at the university who have the expertise in psycho- and neurolinguistics. Furthermore, I also specialize in language disorders. That makes me more special. In addition, the masters degree has enabled me to assist students who are conducting research as their final project. My research skills were sharpened in the research classes held in the three universities I attended. Now, I can be critical about students' research proposals and projects as well as about my own research plans.

Yet, being special is not always nice. There are not many people who specialize in psycho- and neurolinguistics and it means that I have to start something quite new. While this can be viewed as a challenge, I have found it quite difficult to do because of two things. The first is that I am a junior at the Faculty of Humanities and I have not established enough contacts throughout the faculty and the university. The second thing is that the English Department, where I teach, is overwhelmed by classes, at department, faculty, and university levels. It is not easy to develop my own research project when I am caught up in teaching twenty hours a week, preparing lessons for about ten hours, and correcting students' work for about five hours.

What I am doing right now is teaching English Phonetics and Phonology to second semester students and English Morphology to third semester students. It is not really what I want to do since I am not much of a "purist"; I am an applied person because I consider applied linguistics as more beneficial for my professional development. However, this is a way of pioneering interests in linguistics in general at the English Department. For about twenty years, linguistics has not been considered interesting by the majority of students and its popularity has been less than that of English literature and English Cultural Studies. Much of the unfortunate condition was caused by the approaches the previous lecturers used which were considered to be too strict and intimidating by the students. The two subjects were taught as being self-contained and theoretical. Hence, students could not or did not see why they studied them except for obtaining grades necessary for the completion of their studies. As the two subjects are the first two core linguistics subjects students have to study, the unfortunate condition somehow shaped their perception to linguistics and affected enrollment in linguistics option courses in their later years of study.

Although I did not study phonetics, phonology, and morphology in depth in the EMCL, the program has helped me to set a possible reason for students, which is pure linguistics is needed as a basis for applied linguistics, such as psycho- and neurolinguistics, which in turn can be used as a basis for professional work such as therapies for people with aphasia, dyslexia, Specific Language Disorders (SLI), or other language impairments. Hopefully, this can provide students with a view that pure linguistics is not just for theorists but also for practitioners and it can be used in daily life.

In my opinion this awareness has a far reaching effect for the welfare of the language impaired. In a poor country where staying alive is often a big problem for many people, not being able to speak or having other language problems is not considered life-threatening. For example, many people who have had stroke and are paralyzed cannot afford the medication or treatment necessary. If finally they can eat or walk well again, that is enough. Yet, without speech some of them certainly cannot work as before they had the stroke and cannot express their thoughts, which can be emotionally disabling. If many people are aware that language is a part of a quality life, hopefully the stroke patients can be assisted to regain their language.

Another example is children with dyslexia. As about half of Indonesian are poor according to UNDP's standard as per April 2007, education is not a priority for poor households. When children of those households experience literacy problems that are perhaps due to dyslexia, it is almost impossible to help them. The first reason is that they cannot afford the therapy which are paid according to the hours spent. The other reason is that the therapy may not be available in all regions as the number experts is still not proportional to the number of people and they are not evenly distributed. Hopefully, with further skills in therapy or intervention, the linguistics students can conduct effective and efficient language therapies throughout Indonesia and can promote the awareness of the importance of assisting the language disabled.

Outside the university, I have been engaged in activities administered by the Indonesian Speech Therapist Association (IKATWI/ Ikatan Terapis Wicara Indonesia). In March 2007, I participated in a seminar on autism in which I shared what I knew about Pivotal Response Training (PRT) to assist the speech development of children with autism. Many of the participating parents were curious about the training because PRT was new at that time. I have also arranged with IKATWI to develop my research on dyslexia screening test further. The research was my masters thesis and it is very promising to be developed into a good screening test due to the good results obtained. There are just a few problems that are still needed to be solved. If they are solved, the dyslexia screening test will help identify children with dyslexia and will be a good start to therapies. The reason why I cooperate with IKATWI is that I would like to establish links with practitioners in the field of language impairments in general so that I can conduct research that can be applied by them and can help the general public. I hope by doing this the therapies conducted in Indonesia will be scientific and attuned to the real needs of Indonesian people.

My cooperation with practitioners hopefully can also bridge the gap between my expectation and the condition that exists in the Faculty of Humanities that I mentioned earlier. If the development of clinical linguistics in the faculty is slow, perhaps I can develop myself faster outside the faculty. The practitioners are the ones who know what needs to be done because they are the ones that face the public every day. For example, I was told that Indonesia does not have information on children's normal language development yet. In the absence of norms it is difficult to diagnose language delays and evaluate whether interventions are successful or not. Then research is needed to establish the norms.


Before I conduct a large scale study to investigate the course of normal language development of children in Indonesia, I plan to do a pilot project with my son, who is now five months old. I would like to see how his language progresses and record important milestones in the development. Actually I am taking advantage of my current condition in which I cannot frequently do field work because my son still needs a lot of attention and care. Rather than totally stopping my ambition of finding out the normal course of language development of Indonesian children, I prefer to do what I can which can still shed light on the issue.

While attending the EMCL is a very valuable experience in my life, I do not think that the knowledge I got from it is already sufficient. The first reason is that because there was a kind of disorganization between the universities so that what was taught in one was not really compatible with what was taught in others. This was very apparent especially between the subjects taught in Joensuun yliopisto (Finland) on the one hand and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (the Netherlands) and Universität Potsdam on the other. What was taught in Joesuu was not linked to disorders that were to be learned later in RuG and Universität Potsdam. Secondly, I believe that the program was too theoretical. While it is true that theories and research skills are needed to be good researchers, practical skills that can be obtained from hands-on experience in therapies or intervention are also needed by people in developing countries where language intervention has not been considered important. To improve the program further, it is a good idea to incorporate therapy observation and practice.

The insufficiency of the knowledge I got from the EMCL has led me to search for further studies that can help me deepen my theoretical and practical knowledge. I was already offered to participate in a PhD program in crosslinguistic study to aphasia by one professor in RuG. Now I am waiting for the news whether the proposed budget is accepted or not by the funding organization. The final decision is due to be given before Christmas this year. If the budget is not granted, I plan to offer my research project on dyslexia to a PhD program in London, UK. This program focuses more on dyslexia and autism, two disorders that have been my greatest interest. I pray that the new year that will come in three weeks will give me good news. If I cannot continue my study in 2008, I wish that I can still progress in my teaching and research projects at the University of Indonesia.