I am highly skeptical of the last paper you linked.

First, they make the classical mistake of concluding causation where there is only correlation. In particular, there is no discussion whatsoever about possible confounders, i.e. common factors that influence both programming ability and English proficiency. Some on top of my mind:

- Owning a computer with internet access at home

- Effort/ability from the individual students (reflected in overall grades in all subjects)

- Students' language ability in their mother tongue (can hint at students' difficulties in expressing their thoughts in a structured manner)

Second, their statistical analysis is inadequately simple. In particular, given that they only have 16 students with intermediate English knowledge, I would not be surprised if the difference in grades distribution was not statistically significant.

Third, quoting from the paper:

> In analyzing the data, the grade E for computer programming course was excluded because it did not reflect the relationship between English language proficiency and computer programming ability.

This is quite a red flag, they are essentially removing data that does not show the correlation they want! And nothing is said about these students: how many they were, their English proficiency, etc.

Finally, as anecdotal evidence, a sizable portion of my classmates were unable to come up with even the simplest algorithms, even when taught in and asked to use pseudo-code inspired from their mother tongue.

> * How does English proficiency correlate with programming mastery: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277097932_A_CORRELA....

I find this conceptually wrong, at least, based on the abstract.

They're looking for a correlation:

> This research is conducted to find out whether the learners' English proficiency correlates or affects the learners' ability or mastery in writing a computer program

which is appropriate, but their conclusion:

> The result of this study can be used as a consideration in improving the teaching of English for Informatics Engineering learners

implies causation, which contradicts their intent.

My point is - there are a lot of variables at play, the simplest being that people who are good in spoken languages, are naturally inclined to learn a computer language (d'oh).

I think a very interesting way to make the research more rigorous, would have been to test with a non-english programming language (although, based on their approach, that would require a whole semester).

Am I missing something?

> implies causation, which contradicts their intent.

“affects”, as stated in the intent, is the same as causation, so, no, it doesn't “contradict” the intent.

You may believe that their results only properly support correlation and not causation, but causation was clearly within the stated intended scope of the research.

Despite the apparent intrigue, non-English programming languages fail to build on the canon except through bilinguals, and this alone is a good reason not to bother.

Also, correlation between English test proficiency and academic success in programming school is not a clean metric, and does not necessarily measure a correlation between “English proficiency” and “programming mastery”.