- When using technical vocabulary you have two competing goals:
- Helping students develop fluency with technical vocabulary
- Making the vocabulary accessible to students who might be alienated by the technical vocabulary.
- You can address these competing goals by using language consistently.
- This also gives students the opportunity to become comfortable speaking with and hearing technical vocabularies that will translate outside of the classroom environment.
- Be sure to use technical language instead of using non-technical synonyms which can introduce confusion.
- Examples of important vocabulary in an introductory course include:
- Function call
- Parameter
- Pointer
- Implementation
- Object-Oriented keywords
- Vocabulary that appears in the programming language error messages.