ABSTRACT
Computer Science (CS) is taught in India, using English as the medium of instruction, to students whose native language is not English. This places a high cognitive load on students who learn programming for the first time and who are not very proficient in English. The problems these students face become even harder since learning to program can be an incredibly difficult task. Our study aims to find out if a student's native language has any effect on the student's ability to learn programming. We taught linked list, a basic concept in CS, to two groups of undergraduate students for a week in Tamil Nadu, India. We used English to teach one group of students and English and Tamil (the native language in Tamil Nadu) to teach the other group. Our intervention consisted of three lectures and one live-coding session. We collected quantitative and qualitative data using technical tests and open-ended feedback respectively. We found that although teaching programming using both English and Tamil is no different when compared to using only English with respect to student learning, students have expressed positive opinions about teaching and learning CS using two languages.
- E Annamalai, JW Tollefson, and ABM Tsui. 2004. Medium of power: The question of English in education in India. Medium of Instruction Policies--Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? (2004).Google Scholar
- Colin Baker. 2003. Biliteracy and transliteracy in Wales: Language planning and the Welsh national curriculum. Bilingual education and bilingualism (2003).Google Scholar
- Peri Bhaskararao. 2002. English in contemporary India. ABD (2002).Google Scholar
- Genevieve Boulet. 2007. How does language impact the learning of mathematics? Let me count the ways. Journal of Teaching and Learning (2007).Google Scholar
- Edward Roland Cimler. 1973. Gain vs. posttest scores as predictors of future performance. Master's thesis. bibinfoschoolCiteseer.Google Scholar
- David Crystal. 2012. English as a global language. Cambridge university press.Google Scholar
- Dimiter M Dimitrov and Phillip D Rumrill Jr. 2003. Pretest-posttest designs and measurement of change. Work (2003).Google Scholar
- Jennifer R Fennema-Bloom. 2009. Code-scaffolding: A pedagogic code-switching technique for bilingual content instruction. Journal of Education (2009).Google Scholar
- Ofelia García and Claire E Sylvan. 2011. Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal (2011).Google Scholar
- Gene V Glass and Kenneth D Hopkins. 1970. Statistical methods in education and psychology. Prentice-Hall Englewood Cliffs, NJ.Google Scholar
- Sandeep Jain. 2017. GeeksforGeeks: A computer science portal for geeks. http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/. (2017). http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/Google Scholar
- N Jayaram. 1993. The language question in higher education: trends and issues. Higher Education (1993).Google Scholar
- Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie. 2006. The C Programming Language. (2006).Google Scholar
- Wilfred WF Lau and Allan HK Yuen. 2011. The impact of the medium of instruction: The case of teaching and learning of computer programming. Education and Information Technologies (2011). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Frederic M Lord. 1956. The measurement of growth. ETS Research Report (1956).Google Scholar
- Catherine M Mazak and Claudia Herbas-Donoso. 2015. Translanguaging practices at a bilingual university: A case study of a science classroom. Bilingual education and bilingualism (2015).Google Scholar
- T Murugavel. 2011. The Problems of Non-English Medium Engineering Students and Possible Solutions. (2011). http://worldlitonline.net/the-problems-of-non-english.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Yogendra Pal. 2016. A Framework for Scaffolding to Teach Programming to Vernacular Medium Learners. Ph.D. Dissertation. bibinfoschoolIIT, Bombay.Google Scholar
- Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2012. Comparison of English versus Hindi Medium Students for Programming Abilities Acquired through Video-Based Instruction. In T4E. IEEE. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2015 a. Classroom Versus Screencast for Native Language Learners: Effect of Medium of Instruction on Knowledge of Programming. In ITiCSE. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2015 b. Effect of medium of instruction on programming ability acquired through screencast LaTiCE. IEEE. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Margaret Probyn. 2001. Teachers voices: Teachers reflections on learning and teaching through the medium of English as an additional language in South Africa. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (2001).Google Scholar
- Margaret Probyn. 2005. Learning science through two languages in South Africa The 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Somerville, MA.Google Scholar
- Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, Kasama Ketsuriyonk, Jignesh M Patel, and Richard Halverson. 2017. What Do Students Feel about Learning Programming Using Both English and Their Native Language? LaTICE 2017. IEEE.Google Scholar
- Marc J Rubin. 2013. The effectiveness of live-coding to teach introductory programming SIGCSE. ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Donald W. Zimmerman and Richard H Williams. 1982. Gain scores in research can be highly reliable. Journal of Educational Measurement (1982).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Does Native Language Play a Role in Learning a Programming Language?
Recommendations
Effect of Native Language on Student Learning and Classroom Interaction in an Operating Systems Course
ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationUnderstanding an operating systems (OS) code base is a difficult task since it involves understanding a huge amount of low-level C and assembly code. The inherent level of difficulty associated with OS topics is high because of the high element ...
Mobile-assisted language learning: effects on EFL vocabulary learning
The study examined the effect of self-paced use of smartphones as mobile learning tools on English as a foreign language EFL vocabulary learning. Ninety-three Taiwanese college students were assigned to two vocabulary learning groups. An independent-...
The Role of WSD for Multilingual Natural Language Applications
TSD '02: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Text, Speech and DialogueNowadays, the need of advanced free text filtering in multilingual environment is increasing. Therefore, when searching for specific keywords in multilingual information space, it is desirable to eliminate occurrences where the word or words of each ...
Comments