Questions on Spoken Language and Terminology for Teaching Computer Science

Abstract

Spoken and written language are key factors for communication, especially for teaching and learning in general and for all subjects. In K-12 schools, 'being fluent with information technology', 'CS fluency and competency', 'computer literacy' and 'computational literacy' are terms for learning objectives of ICT, computer science courses that refer to skills in CS as well as to reading and speaking. But in most cases, the term 'language' in the context of CS refers to programming languages or formal languages. This paper is neither on programming languages nor on students' knowledge or (their wrong) usage of certain terms. We would like to raise awareness for the problem area of spoken language and proper terminology for teaching and learning CS. As a first step, we provide definitions of terms and aspects of theory related to this problem domain to start a meta-discourse on spoken language for teaching CS. We present some observations from different perspectives as examples for the need of further research. We then derive a list of research questions to open the research area of 'CS classroom language', structuring it from different perspectives.