Relating Needs Analysis

Result to ESP Course Design

What is Need Analysis?

 Needs analysis or needs assessment is an integral part of language

curriculum development. It provides the basis for lesson planning, syllabus
design, materials evaluation and development, and instructional design
and assessment development.
 ESP programmes recognise needs analysis as a starting point for
examining what kind of English learners need to learn.
 This helps ESP teachers and course designers to identify specific needs of
learners before and even during the course that learning needs in
particular continue to evolve.
 IMPORTANCE OF NEEDS ANALYSIS

 “The curriculum content and learning experiences should be

negotiated between learners, teachers, and coordinators at the
beginning of the project and renegotiated regularly during the project”
(Knox, 1997, p. 20).
 “Needs leads to a very focused course” (Dudley-Evans and St John
1998, p. 122). This means that NA relates students' needs to the ESP
course objective, which changes according to the nature of the
discipline.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMING OF NEEDS
ANALYSIS

 Needs should be seen as resources for fully understanding histories, social

and cultural values, beliefs and identities of the learners.
 Needs should also be viewed as short- and long-term investments that
motivate the learners to spark their vested interest and passion for
developing English, which is required to function in their specialised or
disciplinary domain.
 Both inferred (objective, emic) needs and expressed (subjective, etic)
needs are inextricably intertwined, and encapsulated in two domains:
present and future social discourse communities (e.g. school and college
or school and workplace).
Approaches to Needs Analysis

 Deficiency Analysis
Deficiency analysis is defined by West (1994) as a type of needs analysis
designed to take account of learners’ present needs/wants as well as the
requirements of the target situation.
One advantage of the approach of deficiency analysis is that it laid the basis
for the use of the questionnaire method to determine learners’ actual needs.
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

 It is the fabric of the curriculum development process. It is a dynamic approach to

needs analysis.
 The situational approach emphasises how needs are investigated based on complex
and diverse situational factors because contexts for language programmes embrace
different dimensions or variables that come into play in a specific situation.
 These factors may include political, ideological, social, economic, historical, cultural and
institutional, which are seen to have a bearing on the implementation of the language
programmes.
Situational or environment analysis on
needs
TASK-BASED APPROACH

 A task-based approach to needs analysis aims to look at what target tasks and present
learning tasks learners are able to perform.
 The concept of tasks was initially introduced by Prabhu through the Bengalore project,
which aimed to implement a large-scale syllabus design based entirely on tasks within a
communicative curriculum framework (Pica, 2008;Robinson, 2006).
TASK-BASED APPROACH

 The goals of adopting a task-based approach to needs analysis are to transform real-world
tasks into pedagogical activities.
 A task may be “situationally authentic” by designing real-world activities such as buying a
bus ticket, purchasing a notebook online and opening a bank account and it should
interactionally authentic by adopting or adapting language-mediated activities similar to
real-life language use (Ellis, 2003, p. 6).
Task based analysis on needs
Approaches to Needs Analysis

 Learning-Centered Approach
Hutchinson and Waters (1987) have developed a learning-centered
approach in view of designing a model that can easily analyze students’
needs from the onset up to the target situation. Important in this systematic
approach is that learners give much care to the learning process as a focus
of the analysis rather than the knowledge they want to possess at the end of
the classes.
It is argued to offer many advantages. For instance, it can ensure a constant
systematic assessment of students’ needs with the help of such data
collection instruments as interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and observations.
Another feature of this approach concerns the use of authentic materials as a
way to encourage students to cope with the original texts.
ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

 Ethnography as an investigative tool, central to wide-ranging disciplines of study, is a

reflexive process, which involves common steps: (a) selecting and sampling cases, (b)
gaining access and negotiating it with gatekeepers, (c) observing and interviewing,
(d) recording and managing data and (e) analysing the data analysis and writing a
research report (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007.
 The primary aim should be to describe what happens, how the people involved see
and talk about their own actions and those of others, the contexts in which the action
takes place, and what follows from it”.
ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

 The analysis followed four main steps, including:

 Step 1. Observe the students in their natural academic environment;
 Step 2. Ask the students about their communication practices, needs, and problems;
 Step 3. Ask the subject specialists;
 Step 4. Ask ourselves, the language specialists.
 As another example, Gimenez (2001) used an ethnographic participant observation
to examine patterns of business negotiations among businessmen from different non-
English speaking countries.
 CORPUS APPROACH

 The use of narrative has a long tradition in language curriculum design, teacher education and
teacher professional development (Barkhuizen & Wette, 2008; Macalister, 2012). In the
educational domain, narratives can capture insiders’ perspectives on one’s particular
experience of life/reality (e.g. learners, families, teachers and administrators).
 Narratives allow interested stakeholders to enhance their awareness about language use in
English language instructional contexts among others (Razfar, 2012).
 There is a myriad of sources of narratives that researchers can examine, including oral, written
and visual texts, field notes, journals, participants’ diaries or photo novella, and their own
commentaries, alongside related cultural representations and records of important realities in
their own and their interviewees’ lives.
References:

 The Role of Needs Analysis in ESP Course Design Case of master one
students of Finance and International TradeYear Students at Biskra
University
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a747/952b0a6b0f4b4749e69508536f805b
b0e5e3.pdf
 Needs Analysis in ESP Context: Saudi Engineering Students as a Case Study
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1165016.pdf