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Far more high school students failed the Indonesian language test than the English test during last month’s national exams, the National Education Ministry revealed on Thursday.

According to ministry data, 1,786 of the 4,648 students who failed the exams did so after coming up short on the Indonesian language test, compared to just 152 who failed the English exam.

Fasli Djalal, the deputy education minister, said the results highlighted a “sad” downward trend in the average score for the Indonesian language exam over the past several years.

“This is due to the decrease in interest among students to read Indonesian,” he said.

He added students tended to dismiss the importance of studying the Indonesian language because they used it in their daily conversations.

“They think that it’s something they don’t need to study to be good at,” Fasli said.

“But language is like sports — the more you practice, the better you get. For Indonesian language, the more you read, the better you understand how to get the main idea of the texts, and the more creative you become in re-writing those ideas.”

Charisma, a student at a senior high school in East Jakarta, said Indonesian did not make for an interesting subject.

“The classes are a bit boring and the teachers don’t motivate us to learn,” she said.

“I know it’s an important subject, but the exam is about formal Indonesian, whereas we use colloquial Indonesian in everyday use. Besides, I think the English class is more interesting.”

Fasli said the high number of failures was also a worrying sign that Indonesian language teachers were not qualified to teach students properly.

“They don’t have good methods of teaching or of evaluating the students’ language,” he said.

Fasli called on educators to adopt teaching methods that would encourage students to actively learn the language.

“Sometimes teachers need to work a little harder in teaching their students,” he said.

“Teach them how to read, write, listen and speak in the proper way. Teachers should also be able to teach them speed reading so that they can comprehend a given text faster.”

However, he conceded that the lack of qualified teachers had always been part of the challenge facing the government in the education sector.

“We’ve realized, particularly among elementary school teachers, that most of them don’t even have a bachelor’s degree yet.”

He added another issue was that the country still did not have a comprehensive standardized test for the Indonesian language, like the TOEFL for English, to test students’ understanding and use of the tongue.