  Background: In times when the ability to program is becoming increasingly
important, it is still difficult to teach students to become successful
programmers. One remarkable aspect are recent findings from neuro-imaging
studies, which suggest a consistent role of language competency of novice
programmers when they learn programming. Thus, for effectively teaching
programming, it might be beneficial to draw from linguistic research,
especially from foreign language acquisition.
  Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate the feasibility of this
idea, such that we can enhance learning programming by activating language
learning mechanisms.
  Method: To this end, we conducted an empirical study, in which we taught one
group of students an artificial language, while another group received an
introduction into Git as control condition, before we taught both groups basic
programming knowledge in a programming course.
  Result: We observed that the training of the artificial language can be
easily integrated into our curriculum. Furthermore, we observed that language
learning strategies were activated and that participants perceived similarities
between learning the artificial language and the programming language. However,
within the context of our study, we did not find a significant benefit for
programming competency when students learned an artificial language first.
  Conclusion: Our study lays the methodological foundation to explore the use
of natural language acquisition research and expand this field step by step. We
report our experience here to guide research and to open up the possibilities
from the field of linguistic research to improve programming acquisition.
