Effect of Native Language on Student Learning and Classroom Interaction in an Operating Systems Course

Abstract

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 interactivity (i.e., material consists of elements that heavily interact). The mental effort associated with learning a complex subject like OS may be higher for non-native English speakers, when the subject is taught in a natural language (i.e., 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 along with English on students' understanding of select topics in OS. We designed an experiment to teach CPU virtualization using xv6 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 the OS topics taught, before and after our intervention respectively. We also collected data on the questions that students asked in lectures during our intervention. We found that teaching OS using native language and English is no different than teaching OS using only English with respect to student learning. We also found that the native language had an impact on the student engagement and classroom interaction by creating more dialogue within the Tamil+English (experimental) classroom when compared to the English-only (control) classroom.