APPLYING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (SLA) STRATEGIES TO PROGRAMMING EDUCATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LEARNING APPROACHES IN EARLY JAPANESE CURRICULUM

In recent years, the “government curriculum guidelines” have been revised in Japan to emphasize the early introduction of English and programming education. Foreign language activities were included in elementary school curriculum as for English education, and full-fledged information education began in elementary and secondary education as for programming education. There are two specific methods, i.e., “learning concepts themselves” and “learning from examples,” for learning concepts in programming learning. However, no unified view exists as to which of these two methods should be started in the introductory stage of learning. Many research have been conducted on programming learning strategies. The authors thought that programming languages and English can be regarded as common terms of “second language,” which is a language other than their mother tongue. Moreover, the authors thought that the second language acquisition (SLA) approach, which has been extensively studied in programming language learning, could be applied. In this paper, the authors classify the subjects they are in charge of using the level classification method of programming language learning defined in previous research. This categorization indicates that the author's course covers all comprehension levels defined in the second language acquisition project in blended learning (SLA-aBLe) project (from minimal comprehension to advanced fluency).