Chapter 3

Khoirul umamMonitha geraldine

Needs Analysis

Procedures used to collect information about learners’ needs are known as needs analysis.According to Iwai et al. (1999), the term needs analysis generally refers to the activities that are involved in collecting information that will serve as the basis for developing a curriculum that will meet the needs of a particular group of students.

• Needs analysis was introduced into language teaching through the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) movement

• • To determine which students from a group are most in need of training in particular language skills• To identify a change of direction that people in a reference group feel is important• To identify a gap between what students are able to do and what they needs to be able to do• To collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing

The Purposes of needs analysis

• To determine current levelss of language proficiency of employees

• To determine how many employees are in need of the language training

• To identify employees’ perception of language difficulties they facee on job

• To determine the language characteristic of those transactions

The first step in conducting a needs analysis is therefore to decide what its purpose or purposes are, for example when a needs

analysis of restaurant employees, the purpose might be:

• Curriculum officers in the ministery of education• Teachers who will teach from the new

curriculum• Learners, who will be taught from the

curriculum• Writers, who are preparing new textbooks• Testing personnel, who are involved in

developing end-of-school assessment

The users of needs analysisIn conducting a needs analysis to help revise the secondary school English

curriculum in a country, the end users include

The target population in a needs analysis refers to the about whom information will be collected. In conducting a needs analysis to determine the focus of an English program in public secondary school in an EFL context, the target population may include:• Policy makers• Ministery of education officials• Teachers• Students• Academics• Employers• Vocational training specialists• Parents • Etc.

The target population

• Queestionaires • Interviews• Meeting • Observation• Collecting learner language samples (written or oral

task, simulation or role plays, etc)• Case studies• Analysis of avalaible infromation (books, journall

articlesc, etc)

Procedures for collecting information during a need analyisis can be selected from among the following

• Needs analysis examines what the learners know already and what they need to know.

• Needs analysis makes sure that the course will contain relevant and useful things to learn.

• Good needs analysis involves asking the right question and finding the answers in the most effective way.

Necessities : what is necessary in the learners’ use of language? Ex: do the learners have to write answers to exam questions?

• Lack : what do the learners lack? Ex: are there aspects of writing that were not practised in their previous learning?

• Wants : what do the learners wish to learn

The various focuses of needs analysis

• Another way to look at needs is to make a major devision between present knowledge and required knowledge, and objective needs and subjective needs.

• Very roughly, lacks fit into present knowledge, necessities fit into required knowledge and wants fit into subjective needs

• Information about objective needs can be gathered by questioners, personal interviews, data collection (ex: gathering exam papers or text book and and analysing them) observation, informal consultation with teacher and learners, and test.

• Subjective needs are discovered through learner self assessment using list and scales, and questioners and interviews

• The outcomes of needs analysis must be useful for curiculum design

Goals Questions Type of information in the answer

Language

Ideas

Skills

Text

What will the course be used for?How proficient does the user have to be?What communicative actvities will the learner take part in?Where will the language be used?What contents matter will the leaner be working with?

How will the learner use the language?Under what conditions will the language be used?Who will the learners use the language with?

What will the language be used to do?What language uses is the learner already familiar with?

SoundsVocabularyGrammatical structuresFunctionsSet phrases and set sentencesTopicsThemesTextListeningReading SpeakingWritingDegree of accuracyDegree of fluencyGenres and discourse typesSociolinguistic skills

Questions for focusing on needs

MONITHA GERALDINE (F2201141016)

Needs Analysis ToolsEvaluating Needs AnalysisIssues in Need Analysis

Needs Analysis Tools

Necessities

The first thing to look at in necessities is the demands of the target tasks.

That is, what will learners have to do when they do university study?

Among the things they will have to do is listen to lectures, write assignments and tasks, and sit exams.

Needs Analysis Tools

Necessities

If we take assignments as one example of the things they have to do, we could analyze the kind of language needed to do an assignment as a way of working out what the learners would need to know.

We could do this by doing a vocabulary analysis of good assignments using a program like the Frequency program or the Range program.

Needs Analysis Tools

Necessities

We can also look at past assignment topics to see the kinds of discourse that learners would have to handle.

Are the assignments mainly descriptions,

analyses, comparisons, persuasive pieces of writing or instructions?

Needs Analysis Tools

Necessities

We could interview university staff who are involved in setting and marking such assignments to see what they expect in a good assignment.

Perhaps they are not concerned with the grammatical accuracy of the writing.

Needs Analysis Tools

Necessities

If we have access to assignments from successful students in previous years, these could be a useful source of information.

We could also look at the timeframe involved in writing an assignment. Do the learners have time to prepare notes, a rough draft, and a further draft?

Needs Analysis ToolsLacks

An important part of needs analysis involves looking at where learners are at present.

How good are the learners at writing assignments now?

One way to investigate this is to look at an assignment or two that the learners have just written.

The assignment can be analyzed from an information perspective, from a grammar perspective and from the discourse perspective.

Needs Analysis ToolsLacks

Another way to look at an assignment is to look at the parts of the writing process and to see what degree of skill in each part is reflected in the assignment.

Another source of information about lacks could come from the university lecturer who marks such assignments.

What do they see as the strengths and weaknesses of the assignment that the learner has written?

Needs Analysis ToolsLacks

The learners themselves are also a very useful source of information about lacks.

One way of gathering information about this is to question the learner about the assignment task using a carefully prepared set of interview questions.

Another way is to get the learner to talk about the assignment task encouraging them to say what they think they have to do to answer the assignment.

Needs Analysis ToolsLacks

To gather data about the learners’ general proficiency, we can interview them, get them to sit tests such as vocabulary tests, grammar tests, writing tests and comprehension tests, or we can get them to do self-assessment using a specially prepared checklist.

Learners’ scores on standardized proficiency tests like the TOEFL test or the IELTS test can be a very useful source of information.

Needs Analysis ToolsWants

Learners have their own views about what they think is useful for them.

We could ask the learners what they think will improve their assignment writing and what they want to be able to do regarding assignment writing by the end of the English for academic purposes course.

Needs Analysis Tools

The main point behind looking at this example is to show that there is a wide range of tools that can be used to analyze needs.

They include text analysis, talking with students both past and present, surveying the environment, looking at pieces of work and talking with teachers, employers and assessors.

Needs Analysis Tools

The times of needs analysis can include needs analysis before a course begins, needs analysis in the initial stages of a course, and ongoing needs analysis during the running of the course.

Evaluating Needs Analysis

Needs analysis is a kind of assessment and thus can be evaluated by considering its reliability, validity and practicality.

Reliable needs analysis involves using well-thought-out, standardized tools that are applied systematically.

Rather than just observing people performing tasks that learners will have to do after the course, it is better to systematize the observation by using a checklist, or by recording and apply standardized analysis procedures.

Evaluating Needs Analysis Valid needs analysis involves looking at what is relevant and

important.

Before needs analysis begins it may be necessary to do a ranking activity to decide what type of need should get priority in the needs analysis investigation.

Practical needs analysis is not expensive, does not occupy too much of the learners’ and teacher’s time, provides clear, easy-to-understand results and can easily be incorporated into the curriculum design process.

Issues in Need Analysis

Common core and specialized language

It is possible to focus on the content of the discipline using common core vocabulary and a few general academic and technical items. Most of the very-high-frequency content words in a particular discipline are from the common core and general academic vocabulary, for example price, cost, demand, curve, supply, quantity in Economics (Sutarsyah et al., 1994).

Issues in Need Analysis

Narrow Focus – Wide Focus

Detailed systems of needs analysis have been set up to determine precisely what language a particular language learner with clear needs should learn (Munby, 1978).

The arguments in favour of a narrow focus include the faster meeting of needs, the reduction of the quantity of learning needed, and the motivation that comes from getting an immediate return from being able to apply learning.

Issues in Need Analysis

Narrow Focus – Wide Focus

If language learners have more than very short term goals for language learning, it is important that their language learning not only satisfies immediate needs but also provides the basis for the development of control of the wider language system.

Issues in Need Analysis

Critical Needs Analysis

Benesch (1996) points out with some striking examples that needs analysis is affected by the ideology of those in control of the analysis.

That is, the questions they ask, the areas they investigate, and the conclusions they draw are inevitably influenced by their attitudes to change and the status quo.

References

Benesch, S. 1996. Needs analysis and curriculum development in EAP: An example of a critical approach. TESOL Quarterly 30, 4: 723–738. [3]

I.S.P Nation and John Macalister (2010) Language Curriculum Design. New York: Routledge.

Sutarsyah, C., Nation, P. and Kennedy, G. 1994. How useful is EAP vocabulary for ESP? A corpus based case study. RELC Journal 25, 2: 34–50. [3]