What Do Students Feel about Learning Programming Using Both English and Their Native Language?

Abstract

Programming 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. Our study aims at finding out what the students feel if their native language is used along with English for teaching programming. As a part of our study, we taught linked list, a basic concept in programming, 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 3 lectures and 1 live-coding session. We collected qualitative data by means of an open-ended feedback from the students. The analysis of this feedback shows that students have expressed positive sentiments about our bilingual teaching methodologies.