A Study on the Effect of Language Ability on Programming Interests

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the effects of three kinds of language competence on three kinds of programming interests. This study’s participants consisted of 39 college students who had begun to learn C programming. It classified language competence into “reading”, “writing”, and “grammatical understanding”, and programming interests into “situational interest”, “latent interest”, and “actualized interest”, and analyzed the effects of each variable of those three groups. This study used Pandas for analysis, and performed reliability testing, descriptive statistics analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. Pearson’s correlation coefficients between the three items on language competence and the three items on programming interests were as follows: .54 ~ .88 in the first survey; .54 ~.95 in the second survey; and .66~.94 in the third survey. All the p values were <.01. In the first survey done after
students learned data, the a_value was 25.016 and the b_value was 0.256. In the second, the a_value was 23.009 and the b_value was 0.275. In the third, the a_value was 18.237 and the b_value was 0.330. The R_squared values for the first, second, and third surveys were .530, .564, and .747, respectively. The performance evaluation results showed that the mean squared errors for the first, second, and third surveys were 30.924, 30.645, and 22.069, respectively. In addition, the RMSE errors for the first, second, and third surveys were 5.561, 5.536, and 4.698, respectively. This study identified that language competence has positive effects on programming interests, helping learners improve their programming writing strength.