Needs Analysis and Curriculum

Development in EAP: An Example

of a Critical Approach
SARAH BENESCH
The College of Staten Island, The City University of New York

Needs analysis research in English for academic purposes (EAP) /

English for special purposes is mainly descriptive. Researchers identify
and describe existing elements of the target situation to provide the
basis for curriculum development. Critical needs analysis, on the other
hand, considers the target situation as a site of possible reform. It takes
into account the hierarchical nature of social institutions and treats
inequality, both inside and outside the institution, as a central concern.
This article explores the literature on needs analysis, offers critical
needs analysis as an alternative approach to examining target situations,
and describes an example of critical needs analysis and EAP curriculum
development in a paired ESL writing/psychology course at a U.S.
college.

E nglish for academic purposes (EAP) /English for special purposes

(ESP) curriculum development is guided by learner needs, defined by
Johns and Dudley-Evans (1991) as the identifiable elements of stu-
dents target English situations (p. 299). The research on learner needs,
known as needs analysis or needs assessment, involves surveying students
about their backgrounds and goals (Frodesen, 1995; Tarone, 1989);
consulting faculty about course requirements (Johns, 1981); collecting
and classifying assignments (Braine, 1995; Horowitz, 1986); observing
students in naturalistic settings, such as lecture classes, and noting the
linguistic and behavioral demands (McKenna, 1987); or combining
these techniques to obtain a description of assignments, discourse, and
classroom behavior (Prior, 1995; Ramani, Chacko, Singh, & Glendinning,
1988). The rationale for needs analysis is that by identifying elements of
students target English situations and using them as the basis of EAP/
ESP instruction, teachers will be able to provide students with the
specific language they need to succeed in their courses and future
careers (Johns, 1991).
Although Johns and Dudley-Evans (1991) present needs analysis as
the neutral discovery of elements of the target situation, Robinson

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter 1996 723

(1991) believes that needs analysis is influenced by the ideological
preconceptions of the analysts (p. 7) and that needs do not have of
themselves an objective reality (Brindley, 1989, as cited in Robinson, p.
7). However, though Robinson acknowledges the political and subjective
nature of needs analysis, she neglects to explain her own ideology when
offering a taxonomy of needs. Instead she presents that taxonomy as
unproblematic aspects of the target situation and students educational
backgrounds: study or job requirements, what the user-institution or
society at large regards as necessary, what the learner needs to do to
actually acquire the language, what the students themselves would like
to gain from the language course, what the students do not know or
cannot do in English (pp. 7-8). The list is a compilation of the work of
various ESP/EAP theorists; no mention is made of why particular items
appear on the list or why others were left out. The impression created is
that they are natural categories, not ones whose choice was influenced by
ideology.
Taxonomies of needs not only hide their ideological basis but also
disregard the unequal social positions of the different parties involved
and the possible effects of such inequality on curriculum development.
Employers, academic institutions, instructors, and learners are presented
as occupants of a level playing field rather than as players whose differing
access to power must be considered. For example, in reference to
Robinsons list, are what the user-institution . . . regards as necessary
and what the students themselves would like to gain to be weighed
equally even though they are at opposite ends of the social hierarchy?
Should students needs be subordinated to institutional requirements, or
should the institution give up some of its power? And how does one deal
with cases in which students are so assimilated into academic culture that
they identify study skills as their needs? Should one accept and be guided
by this congruence between students conceptualization of needs and
institutional requirements or instead be wary of it, suspecting the
hegemonic influence of academic traditions? Needs analysis has avoided
questions about unequal power in the workplace and academia, allowing
institutional requirements to dominate in the name of so-called authen-
ticity, realism, and pragmatism (Benesch, 1993).
The lack of attention in needs analysis to sociopolitical issues and their
effects on curriculum is due in part to the way social context is delineated
in the EAP1 literature. Social context is what takes place outside our own
classrooms (Belcher & Braine, 1995, p. xiii) but not very far outside. It
includes the discourse, classroom interactions, and assignments in
courses across the disciplines but excludes the political and economic

1 For the duration of the article I refer only to EAP, not ESP\EAP, because my examples
come from the EAP literature and my teaching experience is in EAP.

724 TESOL QUARTERLY

forces that influence life inside and outside academic institutions. Needs
analysis has not considered social issues affecting students current
academic lives, such as ambivalence toward studying English or budget
cuts, and those that may affect their future professional lives, such as
deteriorating job opportunities. Yet students may need to examine these
issues to understand the difficulties of pursuing a degree or getting a job
or to participate in political processes that could improve their lives.
Even though the social context of EAP is limited to linguistic and
behavioral expectations of academic culture, researchers make claims
about the social benefits of studying EAP. Belcher and Braine (1995), for
example, allege that academic discourse is a source of power for its
users, even when they are students (p. xvi) as if language conferred
power regardless of students gender, class, race, nationality, and financial
situation or the economic landscape they will face when entering the job
market. However, promoting academic discourse as the key to a secure
and powerful position in society avoids issues of power while claiming to
attend to them.

LIMITATIONS OF A DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH

TO NEEDS ANALYSIS
Distinctions between descriptive and critical research have been made
by Canagarajah (1993), Herndl (1993), Peirce (1995), and Pennycook
(1994a). Pennycook explains that whereas critical research often relies
on descriptive or interpretive approaches, it is not merely descriptive;
rather, it aims also to be transformative (p. 691 ). That is, critical
research focuses on questions of social and cultural inequality in
education and aims to change those conditions of inequality it de-
scribes (p. 691). In a similar vein, Herndl calls for a more critical
approach to the largely descriptive and explanatory research on
professional and nonacademic writing, on the grounds that current
research reproduces the dominant discourse of its research site and
spends relatively little energy analyzing the modes and possibilities for
dissent, resistance, and revision (p. 349). The limited, descriptive
focus of research in professional writing reifies dominant academic
discourses and practices, and ignores the conflicts and struggles among
a range of positions negotiated and sometimes excluded from the
dominant discourse (p. 355).
The following two examples highlight the limitations of a descriptive
approach in needs assessment research. Both studies offer detailed
descriptions of conditions observed and suggestions for student accom-
modation rather than resistance or revision. For both examples I offer
alternative ways of viewing the data that envision faculty and institutional
change.

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 725

 Both examples are from North American contexts. My decision to
exclude examples from EAP in countries where English is not the
national language is that my teaching experience has been with interna-
tional and immigrant students in U.S. colleges. However, the concerns
raised about needs analysis in this article apply to other contexts,
especially the notion that every academic situation presents a different
set of hierarchical and sometimes contradictory needs, including govern-
mental, institutional, departmental, and classroom ones, complicating
the development of EAP curricula. Decisions about how much change
can be effected in the target situation depend on local conditions,
including the EAP teachers status, the receptivity of content teachers,
the political climate in the academic institution and country (Pennycook,
1994b). A discussion of the possibilities and limitations of activism in
countries where the EAP teacher is not a native is beyond the scope of
this article. However, I hope that the example of critical needs analysis in
an EAP class paired to a large psychology large lecture class, described
below in Critical Needs Analysis in a Paired Course, will be useful to
those working in a similar setting around the world.

Descriptive Needs Analysis: In-Class Questions

The first example is McKennas (1987) study of undergraduate

students in-class questions related to lecture and course content in an
introductory phonetics course over five semesters. McKenna wanted to
investigate what made questions coherent in a lecture course commu-
nity and to use the findings on the nature of discourse communities as
the basis of instructional material in EAP courses (p. 199). She
hypothesized that ESL students reluctance to ask questions during
lecture classes might be due as much to lack of familiarity with discourse
conventions of forming community in a lecture setting as to limited
English. To discover these conventions, McKenna observed and
audiotaped lectures, studied students notes, and interviewed a group of
students (510% of the students were nonnative). She found that a small
group of students, the members of the discourse community, knew how
to get the floor and ask questions without alienating other students or
the teacher. The members of the discourse community did not interrupt
the lecture or digress from the material being presented; they asked
questions that allowed the professor to further develop his ideas:
Questions during these lectures were in part the functional equivalents of
responses in conversation that enthusiastic listeners contribute to develop a
story. As these responses in conversation are seen as contributing to the
discourse and not interrupting, so too in a lecture some questions are seen as
contributing to the discourse in much the same way. (p. 199)

726 TESOL QUARTERLY

 McKenna (1987) defines the small group of questioners as self-
appointed spokespeople for the group who are well-tolerated because
they represent the general interest of the group (p. 199). On the other
hand, questioners who frequently interrupted the flow of discourse
were hardly tolerated in this discourse community (p. 199). McKenna
concluded from her study that EAP should not encourage ESL students
to ask questions when they do not understand terms since native
speakers hardly ever do (p. 199). She also cautions that frequent
requests on the part of ESL students for repetition of information could
be perceived as an indirect challenge to the lecturers ability to perform
effectively (p. 200). McKenna recommends that EAP classes teach
particular types of questions that neither challenge nor interrupt the
lecturer: We work with ways of talking and acting in EAP to reshape
these confrontational ways of forming community to ways that are more
respectful of the lecturer (p. 201).

Limitations

McKenna (1987) accepts the conditions she observes as normative. In

her study those conditions were the lecturers dominance of classroom
discourse and the active participation of only a small group of enthusi-
astic listeners. She also accepts that requests for repetition of informa-
tion are considered interruptions in this discourse community whereas
requests for additional information from a small group of students are
deemed appropriate means of forming community.
A critical approach to the data would have led to a search for solutions
to ESL students linguistic and social problems in the lecture class. For
example, when McKenna (1987) discovered that ESL students wanted to
ask for repetition of information, she might have worked with faculty
members to make time for such requests. Or she might have encouraged
the use of peer discussion groups to break up the lecture and give
students time to answer each others questions. After all, students pay
tuition and should be allowed to participate in ways that increase their
understanding. They should not remain silent in order to reassure their
teachers that their lectures are adequate. In a descriptive needs analysis
such as McKennas, the researcher does not look for ways to modify
current conditions but instead aims to fit students into the status quo by
teaching them to make their behavior and language appropriate.

Descriptive Needs Analysis: Sociology Seminar

Priors (1995) research is also descriptive, though his ethnographic

studies take into account a larger number of factors, such as the
professors goals, communication of expectations, evaluation, and

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 727

responses and the students interpretation and execution of writing tasks
and interpretation of the professors responses. However, even though
Prior claims to examine the sociohistoric context (p. 60) of the courses
he observes, his analysis is more psychological than social. He examines
the interpersonal dynamics between students and their professors while
neglecting questions about the social causes of those dynamics.
Prior (1995) investigated a graduate sociology seminar in which seven
students worked as research assistants for their professor, West, who was
principal investigator. Because Park, one of the two ESL students, was
new to Wests study (other students had been previously employed as
research assistants in the same study), she assigned him to run some
statistical analyses and produce tables to accompany the [technical]
report (p. 72). In an interview, West explained that because Park was
new to the project he shouldnt be subject to the same requirement of
producing a finished paper (p. 73) as were students who had been with
the project for two quarters. She admits to having differing expectations
of students. She also admits that although she does not have a sense of
[Parks] . . . writing capacity at this point (p. 73), she expects him to
continue to work on her study for his dissertation. Park, when inter-
viewed, said that West had told him what to do for the seminar (statistical
analysis, production of tables), that he had asked for a different
assignment, that his request was ignored, and that his assignment had
not been the true work (p. 73) that other students had been assigned.
In his analysis, Prior notes that the students work and the professors
responses were dominated by [Wests research], the departmental
program, and disciplinary forums (p. 76).

Limitations

In spite of their influence on the students work and Wests responses,

Prior (1987) does not pose questions about the politics of graduate work
and its effects on the ESL students he studied. How, for example, did the
traditional paradigm of hiring graduate students to carry out the
professors research, rather than allowing them to generate their own
projects, affect the two ESL students? Would Park have been better off
with an assignment that developed his writing abilities than he was with
the number-crunching task he was assigned? How can a professor with
only seven students in a course have little sense of one of the students
writing ability? What does this study, and others like it, tell us about the
treatment of ESL graduate students? Is it common for U.S. universities to
minimize the linguistic demands on these students rather than helping
them with the true work?
By describing the target situation without probing these issues, Prior
avoids considering adjustments U.S. universities could make to accom-

728 TESOL QUARTERLY

modate the ESL graduate students that they accept and whose tuition
they collect. Instead he concludes from his research that EAP should
direct less attention to static conceptualizations of communicative
competence that lead us into well-structured knowledge representations
and more attention to considering how we can facilitate students
development of the communicative flexibility needed to achieve commu-
nication in dynamic, situated interaction (p. 77). In other words,
though Prior does not locate the problem with the students, he believes
that the solution lies in their flexible adjustment to the conditions they
encounter, no matter how undesirable those conditions might be.

DEFINING THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EAP

Priors work raises questions about how social context is defined in the
EAP literature. What does social mean? How is the context delineated?
Below I explore EAP theorists definitions of social context and how they
limit EAPs role in educational reform.
Swales (1990) and Johns (1990) have explained that their work is a
reaction to cognitivist ESL composition research and pedagogy that
focus on writers internal processes and ignore the social context of
writing. Although Swales and Johns claim to take into account the social
context of academic writing in their research, they define that context
narrowly as the demands academic assignments make on students.
Swales, for example, calls for less attention to the cognitive relationship
between the writer and the writers internal world and more to the
relationship between the writer and on his or her ways of anticipating
and countenancing the reactions of the intended readership (p. 220).
Johns (1990) also highlights the reactions of an academic audience in
her comparison of cognitivism and social constructionist. She contrasts
those who focus on the learner as creator of language or the cognitive
elements of the writing process with others who, like the social
constructionists, will be concerned primarily with the audience and
conventions and language of the discourse community to which the
audience belongs (p. 33). The audience of student writing, according to
Johns, consists of members of academic discourse communities with the
power to accept or reject writing as coherent, as consistent with the
conventions of the target discourse community (p. 31). Students, on the
other hand, are novices who must surrender their own language and
modes of thought to the requirements of the target community (p. 33).
Johns (1990) claims that her approach to EAP is social constructionist
and quotes Berlin (1988) approvingly to bolster that claim. However,
social constructionist as defined by Berlin is not intended to reproduce
academic culture by teaching students the dominant discourse and

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 729

behavior. Instead, this rhetoric, which Berlin calls social-epistemic, not
social constructionist, is a political act involving a dialectical interaction
engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer, with lan-
guage as the agency of mediation (p. 488). That is, each of these
features of the context is affected by the interaction: The individual
writer does not surrender to material, social, or linguistic requirements.
Instead, the material, the social, and the subjective are at once the
producers and the product of ideology, and ideology must be continually
challenged so as to reveal its economic and political consequences for
individuals (p. 489).
Though the EAP literature contains instances of students being
consulted about what or how they will learn (Frodesen, 1995; Hutchinson
& Waters, 1987; Tarone, 1989), EAP has not critically analyzed academic
content and teaching, nor has it encouraged students to examine issues
that affect their academic lives and future careers, such as funding for
education and job security. As Raimes (1993) points out, Social construc-
tionist in TESOL literature has been stripped of its ideological basis and
fails to offer an approach that authentically examines and questions the
aims of education and society (p. 308).

CRITICAL NEEDS ANALYSIS IN A PAIRED COURSE

In this section I describe an example of critical needs analysis and EAP

curriculum development in a paired ESL/psychology course. In the
course I took into account conflicting interests from various levels of the
academic hierarchy and explored possibilities for modifying the target
situation.

Course Description

During the 19941995 academic year, I taught two sections of an

intermediate-level ESL writing class linked to a psychology survey course,
one in the fall semester and one in the spring. The psychology course
was a biweekly lecture with about 450 students, taught by two members of
the psychology department, Professors Richter and Allen.2 Richter, the
chairperson of the psychology department, and Allen, an associate
professor, alternated lecturing on the following topics: history of psychol-
ogy, research methods, brain/behavior, perception, consciousness, de-
velopment, learning, motivation and emotion, memory, personality,
abnormal behavior, treatment, social psychology, and industrial organi-

2 Names are pseudonyms.

730 TESOL QUARTERLY

zation psychology. The students final grade was based on scores on three
multiple-choice exams covering four to five topics each. I attended
almost every lecture and took notes. My other data included two
interviews with Richter, precourse and postcourse student question-
naires, written assignments from my class, student questions about
lecture and textbook material, an audiotape of Richters visit to my class
(discussed below), and interviews with students.

Contradictory Demands

The target situation presented a number of contradictory demands on

students from various levels of the academic hierarchy: university,
college, departmental, and classroom. Some of the requirements and
conditions I discovered through needs analysis are listed below in
hierarchical order. Those at the top of the list, where power is concen-
trated, were the most immutable.

University Level

All students must pass a writing assessment test, consisting of a 50-

minute argumentative essay, as a prerequisite to many college-level
courses and to graduation.

College Level

To minimize expenditures, the psychology lectures were held in an

auditorium and recitation sections eliminated.

Departmental Level (Psychology)

To minimize expenditures, students were given machine-scored

multiple-choice tests rather than short-answer or essay exams.
Students were expected to cover a great deal of material in a short
period of time.
Students were expected to apply psychological concepts to their own
lives.

Departmental Level (English)

The goals of the class were

to help students pass the university-wide argumentative essay and
to increase student engagement with ESL writing by linking writing
courses to content courses.

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 731

 One set of contradictions presented by the target situation was that
although the lectures and textbook presented a huge volume of material
and Richter was aware of the limitations of a survey course, he hoped
students would apply the information presented in the lectures to their
lives. For example, because some of the students were parents, he hoped
the information on development would guide them in raising their
children. Unfortunately, however, because budget cuts in prior years had
eliminated recitation sections and increased the number of students
enrolled in the lecture, it was up to the students to make connections
between the material and their experience without the benefit of
discussion with peers or professors.
Reinforcing the contradiction between superficial coverage of a large
number of topics and the goal of deeper intellectual inquiry and
connection making was multiple-choice testing that called for memoriza-
tion of definitions rather than complex understanding of the material.
In addition, although students were enrolled in a traditional lecture
course that required no writing beyond note taking, they had to pass a
university-mandated essay exam as a prerequisite to freshman composi-
tion and other academic courses.
The above list consists of requirements to be fulfilled by students and
conditions they were expected to live with. I do not call them learner needs
because this term confuses institutional demands and learners desires
and because it valorizes features of the target situation that may not be
conducive to learning. My students did not need large lectures or
multiple-choice tests. These forms of teaching and testing resulted from
political and fiscal considerations (defunding of public higher education
and administrative decisions about where to save money), not pedagogi-
cal ones.

Critical Needs Analysis as a Guide to

EAP Curriculum Development

Rather than simply identifying existing conditions and attempting to

adapt students to them, a process Simon (1992) calls narrowing of
human capacities to fit particular forms (p. 142), critical needs analysis
acknowledges existing forms, including power relations, while searching
for possible areas of change. Below I explain how the conditions I
discovered in critical needs analysis guided a curriculum development
process that involved both the understanding of necessity and the
transformation of necessity (p. 144).
To help students manage the contradictory demands of the target
situation and to create possibilities for change, I developed three types of
activities: those which helped students deal with the requirements, those

732 TESOL QUARTERLY

which challenged the requirements, and those which worked outside the
requirements to create possibilities for social awareness and action.

Dealing With the Limitations

The restrictions of the target situation were the unmanageable

amount of material covered in the psychology course, multiple-choice
testing, and lectures rather than dialogue. The activities I assigned to
deal with the existing structures were typical of adjunct instruction,
including having students compare and review their lecture notes, asking
students to write their own multiple-choice test questions and to take
each others tests, and assigning each student a topic from the textbook
to present orally to the class. These activities, which neither ignored nor
disturbed existing conditions, responded to students need to process
the lecture and textbook material and prepare for tests.

Challenging the Requirements

Two activities opposed the status quo by challenging the traditional

position of student as passive listener: student-generated questions for
Richter to answer in the psychology class and Richters visit to the ESL
class. Neither of these activities was part of the existing course structure
and would not have come about without my intervention. However, they
also would not have been possible without Richters gracious and
enthusiastic cooperation.
In the case of the questions about the lecture, students wrote these
both individually and in groups, clarifying the meaning through revision
and editing the language for correctness. They decided collaboratively
which questions to present to Richter, who answered them before
beginning a lecture. This activity took place three times a semester. Some
of the questions were requests for clarification of concepts already
presented; others, such as those listed below, revealed concerns that had
not been addressed either in lectures or in the textbook: Why do I
sometimes get angry about nothing? How can a person kill another
person? How come a persons childhood sometimes affects their
adulthood in a bad or good way? Is it possible to tell the psychological
status of a person by looking at their physical appearance? Is behavior
determined by our environment, or do we choose the way we behave?
Whats the difference between needing drugs psychologically and
needing them physically? Is it true that people have two personalities?
Although these questions shifted some control over the lecture
content from the professors to the students, the activity was limited by
the format it tried to challenge. The answers to the students questions

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 733

came from Richter in an auditorium, a setting not conducive to further
requests for clarification or elaboration. So, although the students
questions guided the professors discourse during the time devoted to
answering them, they did not interrupt the usual flow of discourse from
teacher to student.
A more fruitful interruption to teacher-dominated discourse was
Richters visit to my spring semester class. As they had done for the
lectures, the students prepared questions about the topics they were
studying at that time in anticipation of the visit. Unlike the lecture class,
however, the classroom setting and small class size promoted a comfort-
able exchange of ideas. Removed from what he called the horrible
anonymity of the auditorium, Richter was relaxed and informal. Know-
ing that some of the students were Russian Jews, he told about his
Russian Jewish parents immigration and his upbringing and education.
He then asked the students to introduce themselves. Finally, he answered
some of their questions in great detail, allowing time for students to
discuss the answers and raise new questions. The students written
comments about Richters visit highlighted the humanizing effect of the
small discussion class format:
The feeling of Dr. Richter being a celebrity is gone. Next time, I will have no
problems asking him a question.
The whole visit was built like a dialog. We talked to each other. Not like
during the lecture hours. There we have just to sit and listen, but not to ask or
joke. During the lecture its hard to use our experience toward the theme, but
it was possible on Thursday.
The class was not like the psychology lectures. Richter did not talk much
about the book or what was going to be in the exam. It was a nice and rare
opportunity that we could get direct responses from the professor for every
question we wanted to ask.
I learned more than I did in the lecture class because Im able to ask him
questions face to face instead of yelling out in the big class. . . . In conclusion,
I really like the way he teaching the class which consists of lot of outside
information and experiences. Also I was truly benefitted by his clear and deep
explanations. I hope that he would have more chances to teach us again.
What comes through in the students remarks is that they want and,
one might say, need small classes, informal discussion, discourse that
includes humor and personal anecdotes, and the opportunity to ask new
questions. It is interesting to note that in the last comment the student
wrote that she wanted Richter to teach us again. She included this wish
even though she attended his lectures twice a week but seemed not to
have considered these occasions on which he taught.

734 TESOL QUARTERLY

Creating Possibilities

The third type of activity transcended institutional requirements to

create possibilities for social awareness and action. I briefly mention two
examples of this type of activity.
The first was a series of research and writing assignments on anorexia,
a topic whose definition students were required to memorize for an
upcoming test but that was not presented in any depth during the
lecture. Although dozens of topics received cursory attention in the
psychology curriculum, anorexia was a good candidate for critical
scrutiny, being rich in social implications. Above all, it involves studying
women and power in society, including how much space they are
expected to take up and how much they allow themselves to occupy
(Bartky, 1988). In a forthcoming article I discuss the anorexia curricu-
lum in detail, including the opportunity it created for women in the class
to have a greater voice and the resistance of some men in the class to
studying a topic that at first seemed not to involve them (Benesch, in
press). For the purposes of the present article, I note only that the
critical study of anorexia offered students the opportunity to examine
the social significance of one of the topics briefly mentioned in a lecture,
an opportunity that the psychology course would not otherwise have
presented.
The second example of an activity presenting possibilities for social
awareness resulted from political events: the election of a new governor
in New York State who vowed to cut funding for public higher education.
Here was a chance to help students understand concretely the relation-
ship between governmental politics and education and to encourage
their participation in democratic processes. They had already noticed
the effects of the defunding of public education (Why is it [psychology]
such a big class?) without understanding the causes. Yet, they were
unaware of the governors proposals and of student government and
faculty senate efforts to fight the cuts, including a letter-writing campaign
and demonstrations at the state capitol and city hall. When I informed
them about these activities and suggested writing letters in class, some
were cynical about political activism. However, they agreed to write and
send letters explaining how a tuition increase and cuts in financial aid
would affect them personally. Some also attended demonstrations and
were impressed by the numbers of students who participated. Whether
the letters and demonstrations had an effect on the legislators is not
clear. Some of the funds that were cut were restored and tuition was
increased less than originally proposed, but the campaign to defund the
university continues. Nonetheless, students were involved in the process
that fought the cuts and were made aware of efforts to diminish their
opportunity to pursue a degree. I considered this awareness one of their

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN EAP 735

needs as students in a U.S. university and therefore factored it into the
curriculum.

CONCLUSION

Needs analysis is a political and subjective process. The identification

of elements of a target situation depends on the analysts ideology, as
Robinson (1991) has pointed out. Some will look at the situation and see
what students must do to perform well in that situation; others will see
where possibilities for change exist. Critical needs analysis assumes that
institutions are hierarchical and that those at the bottom are often
entitled to more power than they have. It seeks areas where greater
equality might be achieved.
Critical needs analysis is a reaction to the pragmatic stance of EAP/
ESP: Changing existing forms is unrealistic whereas promoting them is
practical. For example, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) promote a
learning-centered approach while dismissing a learner-centered ap-
proach to ESP as a theoretical attack on established procedures rather
than a practical approach to course design (p. 72). A learner-centered
approach to ESP is impractical, they believe, because since most
learning takes place within institutionalized systems, it is difficult to see
how such an approach could be taken, as it more or less rules out pre-
determined syllabuses, materials, etc. (p. 72).
Hutchinson and Waters (1987), and others, may have underestimated
the possibilities for change offered by existing structures. The most
important lesson I learned from teaching the paired psychology/ESL
class was that Richter was receptive to my suggestions for change because
he was as opposed to the working conditions as I was. He was as much a
victim of budget cuts resulting in huge lectures as the students:
I am so bothered by the horrible anonymity of that room. I walk around. I go
as far as the [microphone] cord will go. Im lecturing and trying to move my
head around. Theres no relationship. Its a terrible thing for them too. You
never know where they are. You dont know what theyre getting, what theyre
enjoying. (personal communication, December 1994)
Richter did not defend the status quo, nor did he expect me to
promote it. He was open to the students questions and to visiting my
class. He did not monitor or restrict the other activities in my class. Of
course, not all faculty are as open to suggestions as he was, yet I have
worked with others who were equally flexible.
Colleagues across the disciplines can be allies in the quest for greater
equality and better working conditions. EAP classes can be agencies for
social change, both in and outside the academy.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank Trudy Smoke for her useful feedback.

THE AUTHOR

Sarah Benesch is Associate Professor of English and ESL coordinator at the College
of Staten Island, City University of New York. She has edited and contributed to two
collections of essays, Ending Remediation: Linking ESL and Content in Higher Education,
published by TESOL, and ESL in Amcrica: Myths and Possibilities (Boynton/Cook).

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