The particular characteristics of every context must be taken into ac- count in programming teaching aiming to minimize problems such as the high rates of withdrawal which are common in these courses as described by the lite- rature. Taking this into account, this work presents results from an observation study carried out in the introductory programming course in a public brazilian university. The results show that it is necessary to adopt other teaching strategies with students with previous failures in this courses, and that there are no evidences that the use of a programming language based on portuguese can favor the programming learning. Such study helps on identifying problems based on students’ data as well as can lead to the development of strategies to overcome such problems.