research-article

Impact of Bilingual CS Education on Student Learning and Engagement in a Data Structures Course

Authors:

Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj,

Viren Abhyankar,

Saswati Mukerjee,

Richard Halverson,

Jignesh M. PatelAuthors Info & Claims

Koli Calling '19: Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

Article No.: 24, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3364510.3364518

Published: 21 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Learning data structures is hard when taught using a new programming language (e.g., C++), while the students had learned introductory programming in a different language (e.g., C). Learning data structures might even be harder for non-native English speakers, when it is taught in a natural language (e.g., English) that is not the students' native language. We were interested in finding the effect of an instructional design that combines the students' native language (e.g., Tamil) along with English on students' understanding of select topics in a data structures course using C++. We designed an experiment to teach a few data structures (e.g., strings, vectors, maps) in the Standard C++ Library to two groups of undergraduate students in Tamil Nadu, India. We taught the experimental group using English and Tamil (native language of students in Tamil Nadu) and the control group using only English. We conducted a pre-test and a post-test to test students' understanding of programming before and after our intervention. We also conducted an English test to assess their competence in English. We collected data on classroom interaction based on the questions that students asked in lectures during our intervention. We found that teaching data structures using native language and English is no different than teaching data structures using only English. We also found that the native language had an impact on the student engagement and classroom interaction by creating more discussion within the Tamil+English (experimental) classroom when compared to the English-only (control) classroom.

References

[1]

John Airey. 2009. Science, language, and literacy: Case studies of learning in Swedish university physics. Ph.D. Dissertation. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

[2]

Lorin W Anderson, David R Krathwohl, Peter W Airasian, Kathleen A Cruikshank, Richard E Mayer, Paul R Pintrich, James Raths, and Merlin C Wittrock. 2001. A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, abridged edition. White Plains, NY: Longman (2001).

[3]

Jens Bennedsen and Michael E Caspersen. 2007. Failure rates in introductory programming. AcM SIGcSE Bulletin 39, 2 (2007), 32--36.

Digital Library

[4]

Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge. 2010. Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching? The modern language journal 94, 1 (2010), 103--115.

[5]

David Crystal. 2006. English worldwide. Cambridge University Press, 420âĂŞ439. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791154.010

[6]

Dimiter M Dimitrov and Phillip D Rumrill Jr. 2003. Pretest-posttest designs and measurement of change. Work (2003).

[7]

Satu Elo and Helvi Kyngäs. 2008. The qualitative content analysis process. Journal of advanced nursing 62, 1 (2008), 107--115.

[8]

Jennifer R Fennema-Bloom. 2009. Code-scaffolding: A pedagogic code-switching technique for bilingual content instruction. Journal of Education (2009).

[9]

Ofelia García and Claire E Sylvan. 2011. Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. The Modern Language Journal (2011).

[10]

Ofelia García and Li Wei. 2014. Translanguaging. The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2014), 1--7.

[11]

Gene V Glass and Kenneth D Hopkins. 1970. Statistical methods in education and psychology. Prentice-Hall Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

[12]

Philip J Guo. 2013. Online python tutor: embeddable web-based program visualization for cs education. In Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education. ACM, 579--584.

[13]

Philip J Guo. 2018. Non-Native English Speakers Learning Computer Programming: Barriers, Desires, and Design Opportunities. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 396.

Digital Library

[14]

Scott Hanselman. 2008. Do you have to know English to be a Programmer? https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DoYouHaveToKnowEnglishToBeAProgrammer.aspx. (2008). [Online; accessed 12-August-2019].

[15]

Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie. 2006. The C Programming Language. (2006).

[16]

Thomas Andrew Kirkpatrick. 2011. Internationalization or Englishization: Medium of instruction in today's universities. (2011).

[17]

Yogendra Pal. 2016. A Framework for Scaffolding to Teach Programming to Vernacular Medium Learners. Ph.D. Dissertation. IIT, Bombay.

[18]

Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2012. Comparison of English versus Hindi Medium Students for Programming Abilities Acquired through Video-Based Instruction. In T4E. IEEE.

[19]

Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2015. Classroom Versus Screencast for Native Language Learners: Effect of Medium of Instruction on Knowledge of Programming. In ITiCSE. ACM.

[20]

Yogendra Pal and Sridhar Iyer. 2015. Effect of medium of instruction on programming ability acquired through screencast. In LaTiCE. IEEE.

[21]

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?. In LaTICE 2017. IEEE.

[22]

Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, Varun Naik, Jignesh M Patel, and Richard Halverson. 2018. How to teach modern C++ to someone who already knows programming?. In Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Computing Education Conference. ACM, 97--104.

[23]

Kyle Reestman and Brian Dorn. 2019. Native Language's Effect on Java Compiler Errors. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. ACM, 249--257.

Digital Library

[24]

Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, Kasama Ketsuriyonk, Jignesh M Patel, and Richard Halverson. 2018. Does Native Language Play a Role in Learning a Programming Language?. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 417--422.

Digital Library

[25]

Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj, Eda Zhang, Saswati Mukherjee, Jim Williams, Richard Halverson, and Jignesh M Patel. 2019. Effect of Native Language on Student Learning and Classroom Interaction in an Operating Systems Course. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. ACM, 499--505.

Digital Library

[26]

Bjarne Stroustrup. 2000. The C++ programming language. Pearson Education India.

[27]

Sara Vogel, Christopher Hoadley, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, and Kate Menken. 2019. The Role of Translanguaging in Computational Literacies: Documenting Middle School Bilinguals' Practices in Computer Science Integrated Units. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 1164--1170.

Digital Library

[28]

Christopher Watson and Frederick WB Li. 2014. Failure rates in introductory programming revisited. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education. ACM, 39--44.

Digital Library

[29]

Li Wei. 2017. Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics 39, 1 (2017), 9--30.

[30]

Jeannette M Wing. 2006. Computational thinking. Commun. ACM 49, 3 (2006), 33--35.

Digital Library

Cited By

Tshukudu EDodoo EHermans FMudongo M(2024)Bilingual Programming: A Study of Student Attitudes and Experiences in the African contextProceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699561(1-11)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699538.3699561
Shah AAgarwal VGranado MDriscoll JHogan EPorter LGriswold WSoosai Raj ALaakso MMonga MSimon Sheard J(2023)The Impact of a Remote Live-Coding Pedagogy on Student Programming Processes, Grades, and Lecture Questions AskedProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3587102.3588846(533-539)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587102.3588846
Lei YAllen MMerkle LDoyle MSheard JSoh LDorn B(2022)English Language Learners in Computer Science EducationProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499299(57-63)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499299
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Impact of Bilingual CS Education on Student Learning and Engagement in a Data Structures Course
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

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 Education

Understanding 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 ...
The Effects of Spanish-English Bilingual Instruction in a CS0 Course for High School Students
ITiCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1

Prior studies in multilingual computing education have shown that many non-native English speakers (NNES) in India struggle with introductory programming courses as they learn both a programming language (e.g., Java) and a natural language (e.g., English)...
Improving secondary CS education: progress and problems

The Institute for Computing Education (ICE) was created in the spring of 2004. ICE is a partnership between the Georgia Department of Education and the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. The goals for this partnership are to increase the number and ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

Koli Calling '19: Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

November 2019

247 pages

ISBN:9781450377157

DOI:10.1145/3364510

Conference Chairs:
Petri Ihantola
University of Helsinki, Finland
,
Nick Falkner
University of Adelaide, Australia

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

University of Helsinki
Univ. Eastern Finland: University of Eastern Finland
The University of Adelaide, Australia
SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 November 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

Koli Calling '19

Koli Calling '19: 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

November 21 - 24, 2019

Koli, Finland

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 182 submissions, 44%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
209
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)28
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 18 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tshukudu EDodoo EHermans FMudongo M(2024)Bilingual Programming: A Study of Student Attitudes and Experiences in the African contextProceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699561(1-11)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699538.3699561
Shah AAgarwal VGranado MDriscoll JHogan EPorter LGriswold WSoosai Raj ALaakso MMonga MSimon Sheard J(2023)The Impact of a Remote Live-Coding Pedagogy on Student Programming Processes, Grades, and Lecture Questions AskedProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3587102.3588846(533-539)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587102.3588846
Lei YAllen MMerkle LDoyle MSheard JSoh LDorn B(2022)English Language Learners in Computer Science EducationProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499299(57-63)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499299
Khan TNabi S(2021)English versus Native Language for Higher Education in Computer Science: A Pilot Study21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3488042.3488070(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488042.3488070
Chiodini LHauswirth M(2021)Wrong Answers for Wrong Reasons: The Risks of Ad Hoc InstrumentsProceedings of the 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3488042.3488045(1-11)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3488042.3488045

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents