Bilingual Learning in English and Programming

Jose Salazar

Mindfulness

Discussion: What have we observed?

Q: What difficulties (if any) have you noticed when watching people who are not native English speakers learn programming?

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Follow-up: In what ways (if any) have you helped them out?

Brief Overview: Does Native Language Play a Role In Learning a Programming Language? (Paper)

• Experiment: Teach 1st yr college students whose native language is Tamil
• Experimental Group: 51 students learned programming using Tamil and English
• Control group: 52 students learned programming with only English
• Study took place during the course, where researcher was a guest lecturer
• Students learned about linked lists in their Data Structures course
• Pre-test and post-test to gauge understanding before/after intervention
• 3 in-person lectures
• Control: Students communicated in English
• Experimental: Students communicated in Tamil/English. Instruction 50/50 language use
• English used to introduce concepts, explain syntax and terms. Tamil was used for additional discussion or to better help students understand
• Live coding session: Instructor coded for 90 minutes in C implementing linked list, talking through the process

Brief Overview: Results of Paper

• Mean of pre-test is higher for Control than Experimental
• Suggests the two groups were at different levels of understanding coming in
• Pre-test score is highly correlated with post-test score
• Pre-test score & group (C/E) had no significant effect on post-test score
• Positive reception to the use of both languages in the experimental group
• Some students felt more comfortable in the class
• Positive reception about the instruction in the control group

Brief Overview: Non-Native English Speakers Learning Computer Science(Paper)

• Deployed survey to Pythontutor.com
• Link to survey was at the bottom of the website, which redirected to Google Form with 8 Q’s
• Voluntary survey (No pay); stayed open from Dec 2016 to Aug 2017
• To standardize responses to Q1-3, languages were canonicalized according to ISO 639-2
• ex. Australian, British, US english were changed to just be English when analyzing survey
• Coded themes for survey responses to Questions 5-8
• Once themes were finalized, group made full pass through responses together to label more
• Google Translate was used whenever survey response was not in English

Brief Overview: Results of Paper

• 840 responses that contained at least one nonblank, non-spam response for any of Questions 5–8.
• 22% of respondents were native English speakers.
• Of the remaining 78% of non-native English speakers, 3% self-rated their level of English reading fluency as Beginner, 14% as Intermediate, 44% as Proficient, and 39% as Fully Fluent
• Barriers
• Problems with Reading Instructional Materials
• Problems with Technical Communication
• Problems with Reading Code
• Problems with Writing Code
• Hard to simultaneously learn English and programming

Brief Overview: Results of Paper (continued)

• Desires
• Use simplified English without cultural slang
• More visuals and videos
• More culturally agnostic language
• Incorporate inline dictionaries
• Action Plan (suggested by authors)
• Understand where learners have trouble
• Add more scaffolding to help code reading and writing
• Use terminology that learners understand
• Contextualization to provide motivation for learning
• Note: There is no generalized design that works for all non-native English speakers

Discussion:

Q: Have you (or someone else) provided advice/suggestions that may not actually be helpful to non-native speakers? Is there another part of the “CS culture” that may not be conducive for non-native speakers?

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Follow-up: Assuming you did, what would you do like to suggest to them instead?

Discussion: Where should the burden lie?

Q: At least within a university setting, is there anything we can actually do? At what level can we address trying to help these learners?

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