Python to pronouns: leveraging computational thinking for English language acquisition

Heather E. Eberhart

doi:10.17918/00011599

English Language Learners and Multilingual Learners (ELLs and MLLs) are expected to increasingly engage in cognitively demanding academic work within digitally mediated learning environments. Although computational thinking (CT) is commonly associated with computer science, its processes, including decomposition, sequencing, pattern recognition, testing, and revision, may also be embedded within language and disciplinary instruction. Limited research, however, has examined how educators understand and mediate the relationship among computational thinking, digital literacy, language development, and equitable access for multilingual learners. This qualitative study employed Constructivist Grounded Theory to examine how Grades 6-12 educators conceptualize and integrate computational thinking and digital literacy within instruction for ELLs and MLLs. The study drew on an NYC-focused educator sample and incorporated three complementary data sources: 37 Reflective Practice Survey responses included in the primary analytic corpus, 12 semi-structured interviews, and 17 instructional artifact sets. Data were analyzed through iterative initial coding, constant comparison, focused coding, analytic memoing, negative and deviant case analysis, category development, and theoretical integration. Findings indicated that computational thinking was not limited to coding and was sometimes embedded in teachers' instructional practices even when educators did not explicitly identify those practices as CT. Language functioned not only as a potential outcome of computational activity but also as a medium through which learners explained, negotiated, tested, debugged, and revised reasoning. Teachers described access as multidimensional, encompassing linguistic, technological, procedural, disciplinary, and institutional conditions. They also characterized the instructional value of technology as conditional and described circumstances in which technology displaced cognitive work that would otherwise remain with the learner. Teachers interpreted language development through indicators including increasing precision, transfer, participation, and independence. The resulting grounded theory, Mediating Access While Preserving Cognitive Demand, explains teacher practice as a recursive process in which educators interpret barriers, modify pathways into complex learning, preserve learners' responsibility for meaningful intellectual work, interpret learner performance, and recalibrate subsequent instruction. The study concludes that equitable integration of CT and digital technology depends less on the presence of particular tools than on teacher judgment regarding what should become more accessible and what cognitive and linguistic work should remain with the learner. CT and digital technology do not support multilingual learners simply because they are present in instruction. What matters is how teachers mediate access to complex learning while preserving learners' responsibility to think, explain, revise, and solve problems. Implications are offered for multilingual instruction, computational-thinking integration, professional learning, curriculum and learning experience design, and the use of artificial intelligence in education.

Python to pronouns: leveraging computational thinking for English language acquisition

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Python to pronouns: leveraging computational thinking for English language acquisition

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