Abstract—In second language acquisition (SLA) environment,
learner is a community member and communicates with others,
whereas, in a foreign language learning, the practicing
dimension is weaker. When it comes to programming, there is
no community using a programming language, thus a SLA
environment cannot exist. For this reason the most adopted way
is teaching programming like a foreign language with all its
drawbacks. In this paper we compare between programming
language and natural language, knowing that the programming
introductory courses have basic concepts without complex
algorithms, in other terms more expressive than computational.
We propose a new method of teaching programming based
upon dialogues between a facilitator and students. The
facilitator will be part of a communication between each
student and the computer to make an environment suitable for
a SLA. A Socratic way of learning is achieved with a teacher
having few students and can participate with his students in
their dialogue and helps through their guidance to express their
ideas. We list 4 common programming problems and we
showed that using dialogue and raising questions, students were
able to resolve these problems.
Index Terms—Memory concept, programming language,
programming learning, Socratic dialogue.
Imad H. El-Zakhem is with the Department of Computer Science,
University of Balamand, Lebanon (e-mail: izakhem@balamand.edu.lb).
Cite: Imad H. El-Zakhem, "Socratic Programming: An Innovative Programming Learning Method," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 247-250, 2016.