How languages changed my life:
At the age of 8, my father brought home a personal computer called Spectravideo. This was back in the 80s and it was the first time I saw a computer.
Apart from playing games, my father also showed me that I can draw shapes on screen using a language called Basic and I found this really fascinating. The problem was that in Iraq we only start to learn English at schools at the age of 11.
The language of computing and a gateway learning English
With the help of my father I started by memorizing by heart a few basic commands. I learned that if I type C I R C L E then put a location, a radius, and a number that represents a colour, I will get a circle, L I N E, gives me a line, and to get my code to get executed I need to type R U N and so on. At the beginning, I did not know what these words meant or how to pronounce them, I just memorised the sequence of letters and what they do.
With my father’s help I started to learn more commands such as print, error, command, next, return, stop. The actual pronunciation, and the meaning of these was not as important to me as what they do, but without realising it, I started to build my English vocabulary. When I started learning English at school at the age of 11, I was happily surprised whenever we learned a new word that I already knew along with its spelling because it was a command in Basic.
Early on I became very passionate about programming and the rate of learning English at school was too slow for me to be able to read programming books. Relying on the dictionary for almost every other word when reading programming books was a very slow process and my father and brother had a good share of ‘what does this word mean’ questions as this was much faster than looking into the dictionary.
I started my professional career as a software developer and learning English helped me gain the skills that started my career, and here I am today an Academic in the School of Computing in Newcastle University.
Dr Ahmed Kharrufa
