Full Paper: Improving Educational Equity and Outcomes in a First-Year Engineering Programming Course through a Content and Language Integrated Approach

Non-native English speakers may encounter unique challenges when learning computer programming for the first time. It could be argued that these students must navigate the complexities of two foreign languages simultaneously. This work aims to address some of the language-related barriers faced by a cohort of ESL (English as a Second Language) international students in a first-year engineering programming course. Our data shows that the majority of students in this cohort enter the course with no prior coding experience or knowledge of programming languages. Being new to programming, combined with the difficulties posed by language barriers and the anxiety stemming from limited English proficiency, may significantly undermine students' confidence, thereby hindering their performance in the course and placing them at a disadvantage compared to their peers in other sections. The primary objective of this work was to achieve educational equity for this group of non-native English-speaking students and support their learning outcomes and success in the course. In an interdisciplinary effort, resulting from the collaboration between an engineering instructor and an academic English instructor, several learning modules on computer programming topics were designed through a linguistic lens to support students in areas such as writing algorithms, identifying conditional and iterative statements in a problem, and deconstructing and interpreting complex programming instructions. To inform our pedagogy and assess the effectiveness of our approach, low-stakes assessments were incorporated into each module and anonymous student feedback was collected. This paper describes the details of our collaborative approach and reports on the impact of our work on student performance and experience.