CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT FACED BY ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT STUDENTS OF UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG PARTICIPATED IN THE 3RD INTERNATIONAL INTERNSHIP PROGRAM TO THAILAND IN 2016

The process of living in the different culture which is called as cultural adjustment can be an exciting and stimulating experience. This topic is essential for the creation of effective intercultural communication to enrich knowledge about cross cultural understanding, especially for those who want to go abroad. Moreover, studying abroad is a major decision that might shape students’ future and also impact on their career. University of Muhammadiyah Malang (UMM) is one of the Universities in Indonesia cooperating with some countries in education such as providing international 3rd internship program to Thailand for all departments of Teacher Training and Education Faculty, one of them is English Language Education Department (ELED). This research focused on the ELED students of UMM who joined International 3rd Internship Program to Thailand in 2016 as the research subjects. There were two purposes in this research; (1) to investigate the cultural adjustments faced by ELED students of UMM participated in international 3rd internship program to Thailand in 2016; (2) to analyze how ELED students of UMM adjusted the culture during the program. This research was qualitative. Furthermore, the researcher used interview and document to get the data. The documents were taking from a book containing their personal writings when they were abroad. It was found that the ELED students faced cultural adjustments happened in two phases. First, feeling worried in terms of communication happened in the anxiety and uncertainty management phase. Meanwhile, experiencing excitement and anticipation, followed by a period of shock and disorientation because of the cultures such as the habit, the foods, the weather, happened in the u-curve phase. However, they tried to adjust the cultures in order to survive and could finish the program by using two strategies, namely understanding of culture shock and the communication competence