Novice Programming Misconceptions in the Vietnamese Cohort: An International Taxonomy and a Hypothesis Set for Linguistic-Curricular Distinctiveness

Novice programming misconceptions are well documented in the international K-12 / CS1 literature: a stable canonical taxonomy spans variables and assignment, control flow, functions, data structures, semantics of expression evaluation, and the underlying notional machine. The Vietnamese cohort — primary informatics from Grade 3 under the 2018 General Education Curriculum, Scratch operationally introduced at Grade 5, Python mandated from Grade 10 (chuyên gifted track from Grade 6–7 in practice through supplementary tracks) — has not been characterised against this taxonomy in the published literature, and the elix-researches programme operates under a strict no-cohort, no-minors empirical scope (founder directive 202604-15). This paper synthesises the international taxonomy from Pea 1986, Soloway and Spohrer 1989, du Boulay 1986, Sorva 2013, Caceffo et al. 2016, Qian and Lehman 2017, and Pane and Myers 1996, organises approximately 28 misconceptions into six axes, and produces a hypothesis set of misconceptions theoretically expected to manifest distinctively in the Vietnamese cohort. Distinctiveness is derived from two structural sources: (a) Vietnamese-language features (zero inflection, no plural marker, SVO with topic-prominence, post-modifying clause structure, classifier system, lexical-tone phonology) and (b) curricular features (Scratch-only operational exposure at Grade 5; Pythonkeyword-as-English-loanword first encounter at Grade 10 in mainstream track or Grade 6–7 in chuyên-supplementary track; minimal pre-programming notional-machine instruction). Each hypothesised distinctive misconception is paired with a falsification test and a downstream programme node where the test would be executed. The contribution is the hypothesis set itself: a literature-anchored, structurally derived, falsifiable inventory that gives downstream Vietnamese empirical work — when and if conducted under cohort-permitting conditions outside the present programme — a pre-registered prediction surface rather than an open exploratory question. The paper is honest about the empirical gap: nothing here is measured against a Vietnamese cohort. The hypothesis set is a research-prerequisite artefact, not a finding.