It sounds ironic for many people. More ironic, however, how could many students manage to achieve pass grades in English and perform much better in it than in the Indonesian language?

This is the first time in history that a great number of students nationwide failed the Indonesian language in this year’s national exam. What exactly is the source of the problem here?

When interviewed by the media, the National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh didn’t explicitly address the real problem of the plummeting numbers of students passing the exam.

He instead remarked that the government has endeavored to improve the quality of the UAN, and consequently, the schools also needed to improve their teaching and learning quality in order that students achieve passing grades.

This remark can be interpreted as if the students and the teachers were to blame for the formers’ poor performance in the exam. Finding scapegoats does not, however, offer the real solution.

As part of my concern about the controversial UAN in general and the failing grades for the Indonesian language in particular, I shared my thoughts with one of the national Indonesian language experts, Prof. Bambang Kaswanti Purwo.

Bambang said the students’ failure in the subject is not due to the nature of the Indonesian language, which laymen consider difficult to learn.

The serious problem lies on the test items, which were designed by representative teachers from different regions in the country.

Bambang said the Indonesian language test is designed using the latest mandated sacrosanct national curriculum, which tends to be more discourse-based than grammar-based.

“Meanwhile, in the 1990s most students passed the subject because the exam was grammar-oriented and teachers taught grammatical rules to the students in class.”

With the discourse-based curriculum, the national exam is geared to what is prescribed in the curriculum.

It is highly likely that teachers, as Bambang argues, still cling to the old paradigm and are therefore not positioned to teach, let alone to design the national test under the discourse-based paradigm.

“I was once shown a question from the Indonesian language exam, asking the main point of a paragraph, but was unable to find the answer from the text. The problem was that the text chosen for the question was, by its nature, not appropriate for testing students’ ability in paraphrasing the main idea.”

Probably, the most plausible reason for explaining the students’ failure in the Indonesian language is that we never allowed the students to unearth their potential in learning their own native language.

In learning a language (both a native and a foreign language), we are always faced with two options: The path of pain and the path of pleasure.

The path of pleasure can help ensure that students are more likely to learn their native language effectively.

For learning a foreign language, the path of pleasure facilitates the acquisition of the language.

The path of pain, on the hand, can also help students learn a language, but it is no guarantee that they will learn it effectively. Taking this path in learning a foreign language cannot ensure that the acquisition process will take place.

 The universal credo of motivation is that people both young and old tend to avoid pain and to seek pleasure.

Thus, the best way to assist our students to learn their native language is to lead them to take the path of pleasure, not the path of pain based on understanding the structural rules governing the use of language and fathoming out how it works. How could we do this?

The most plausible and viable starting point is to exclude the Indonesian language from the national exam.

The reason here is that the subject, by its nature, requires a subjective and ongoing evaluation by classroom teachers so as to better capture the students’ real potential such as his or her abilities in writing an essay, short story or literary criticism and appreciation.

Such potentials are impossible to measure using the standardized national exam which lasts only a
few hours.

Testing specialists concur that classroom-made tests do a far better job than those of the standardized ones designed by distant strangers.

Also, the former is more valid and reliable than the latter because teachers use repeated measures of student performance.

The next step is to promote a campaign on pleasure reading in the students’ native language as has been recently done by the Banten provincial government through the establishment of Taman Bacaan Masyarakat (reading playground for the community).

That is, the students are given freedom to choose what they wish to read both inside and outside of the classrooms without being coerced by their teachers.

It is through this simple, yet effective approach that teachers can eventually find the students’ latent potentials in learning the Indonesian language.

The writer is associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta. He is chief editor of
the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.

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