Does Bilingual Specification impact students' comprehension of problems in Introductory Programming?

Abstract

The global acceptance of English as the language of science poses challenges to its non-native speakers. There has been prior work that assesses the impact of using a native/regional language as a medium of instruction for a Computer Science (CS) class. However, since classroom instruction involves a lot of non-verbal communication as well, the methodology of those studies is difficult to replicate and hence the results are difficult to generalize. In this paper, we focus on a smaller but potentially more replicable aspect. In particular, we are interested in assessing the impact of bilingual problem specifications on student comprehension in Introductory Programming. Problem comprehension is identified as one of the bottlenecks in the process of solving programming problems by novice programmers. Problems posed in English can be even tougher for its non-native speakers to comprehend. A feature of a typical multilingual classroom in India is that, in addition to having different native languages, the students can also have different levels of proficiency in English. Translating the problem to a language in which the students are more comfortable with, and in a way that reflects their use of the language, may result in better comprehension. In this paper, first, we present a framework for translation of a problem from English to a combination of English and a regional language. The framework allows some customization of the translation to suit an instructor’s specific teaching-learning context. We conduct a user study with 25 instructors that gives evidence on the efficacy of the framework. Then we apply it to translate an English variation of the well-studied Rainfall problem [14] to Hinglish (Hindi-English) and pose the two versions to two groups of randomly selected students (who are comfortable with Hindi) respectively. The result of this preliminary user study shows that there is no significant difference in the problem comprehension of students in the two groups.