P R E - A C T I V I T Y

IF YOU WERE TO TEACH AN ESP CLASS:

How would you attempt to establish the needs of the learners
attending the course?

What strategies would you employ? Or what strategies do you

think you could easily and quickly employ to gain an
understanding of the learners’ needs?
I D E N T I F Y I N G
N E E D S
I N T H E D E S I G N
of ESP courses and programs
 BASIC CONCEPTS IN NEEDS
ANALYSIS
Needs Analysis?
-Brown, defines needs
analysis as:
“the systematic collection
and analysis of all
information used for
defining and validating a
defensible curriculum”.
 TO CONDUCT NEEDS ANALYSIS:
You can talk to other instructors of the
course about their experiences.
You can observe some classes and take
notes on what teaching points were
made and the learners’ reactions to
them.
You can also conduct a diagnostic test
of the learners’ proficiency level.
 BASIC CONCEPTS IN NEEDS
ANALYSIS
The meaning of ‘needs'
The word ‘needs’ takes on
different meanings
depending on the
stakeholder and the
context they are in.
Four different
views of needs-
Brown, 2016
 A DIAGNOSTIC VIEW OF NEEDS

1. ‘DIAGNOSTIC’ VIEW
where needs correspond to
language, genres, and
skills that are considered
necessities, essentials, or
pre-requisites for success
in the target setting.
 1. ‘DIAGNOSTIC’ VIEW
A ‘diagnostic’ view of needs
naturally leads to a ranking of
learning objectives with those that
must be achieved at the top, those
that are desirable but less important
in the middle, and those that are
irrelevant and can be ignored at the
bottom.
 A DISCREPANCY VIEW OF NEEDS

2. ‘DISCREPANCY’ VIEW,
where needs correspond to the
lacks, discrepancies, or gaps
between what the learners can
currently do in the language and
what they will need to do in the
target setting.
 A DEMOCRATIC VIEW OF NEEDS

3. DEMOCRATIC VIEW
where needs correspond to
what the different
stakeholders want, desire,
expect, or request
from the ESP course.
It is also important to remember that the wants of other stakeholders
must also be taken into consideration when designing an ESP course
or program.

Instructors will often want to teach small classes with talented,

highly motivated learners. If a course does not match this
description, they may ignore the course goals and teaching materials
and start ‘doing their own thing’.

Institution administrators, on the other hand, might want classes to

be large and cater for a wide range of ability levels. They may also
want the classes to be taught in traditional classrooms, with standard
teaching equipment, at fixed dates in the academic or work calendar.
Unfortunately, it is usually impossible to design a
course or program that meets all the wants of
different stakeholders.

What you can do, though, is attempt to gain an

understanding of these different preferences and
institutional constraints and then negotiate with
all stakeholders to align their needs and hopefully
find a working solution.
 AN ANALYTICAL VIEW OF NEEDS

4. ‘ANALYTICAL’ VIEW
where needs correspond to
elements that Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) theory and
ELT research and practice, have
shown to be the necessary next
step in the learning process
B considers an analytic view
R of needs to be problematic
as we are still a long way
O from having a
W comprehensive
understanding of these
N learning steps
 On the other hand, you should
remember that capturing a
comprehensive list of needs
from different stakeholders using
even one of these perspectives is a
difficult if not impossible task.
CURRENT BEST SHOT (BROWN)

That is one that captures the

most useful information for
planning a course but
makes no claim of being the
complete picture.
 Why do we need to
identify the needs in the
design of ESP programs
and courses?
IDENTIFYING NECESSITIES , LACKS , AND
WANTS
If you have experience teaching, list the procedures
that you have used to assess the necessities, lacks, and
wants of the different stakeholders in a course you have
taught. If you have no experience of teaching yet, ask
one of your course instructors what procedures they
use to determine needs.
IDENTIFYING NECESSITIES , LACKS , AND
WANTS
Based on your answer to Question 1, what other
procedures could easily be employed to more accurately
determine the necessities , lacks , and wants of the
different stakeholders.
IDENTIFYING NECESSITIES , LACKS , AND
WANTS
What are some of the common mismatches that you
have experienced between the wants of instructors and
administrators and those of learners? How could these
differences have been resolved?
CONDUCTING A LARGE-SCALE, DETAILED
NEEDS ANALYSIS
What you are trying to do in a need analysis is establish the diagnostic,
discrepancy, democratic, and analytic views on needs from as many of the
different stakeholders as possible.

Some needs will be related to the target situation (e.g. lacks determined from
an analysis of customer complaints about hotel receptionists)
and others related to the learners’ current situation (e.g. lacks determined
from a pre-workshop English proficiency test.).

Other needs will be related to learning processes and the products of learning
(e.g. vocabulary learning techniques in order to master the English names of
menu items at a restaurant).
A full-scale, detailed needs analysis is usually very
broad in scope and involves many different data
collection methods and resources. Some of the
most common include:
 CONDUCTING A SMALL-SCALE ‘JUST IN
TIME’ NEEDS ANALYSIS

In these ‘just-in-time’ cases,

the following actions can help you quickly establish the necessities, lacks ,
and wants of the learners, and perhaps equally importantly, the expectations
or wants of the administrative team:
• On agreeing to teach the course, discuss briefly with the course
coordinators their views of learners and what they expect learners to study
in class.

• If the course is already established but has a vague or generic title (e.g.
English I), work with administrators to reach a consensus on the goals
of the course and your freedom to interpret these after meeting the learners.
CONDUCTING A SMALL-SCALE ‘JUST IN
TIME’ NEEDS ANALYSIS

• Briefly review any provided materials for the course.

Before entering the classroom, make every effort to obtain samples of

learners’ outputs from previous iterations of the class. Analyze these samples
with the aim of establishing a more detailed and accurate set of necessities
and lacks of learners.

At the start of the first class, provide learners with a brief overview of what
you see as their necessities, lacks, and wants and explain how you arrived at
your decision. Monitor their reactions to see if they agree
with your opinions.
 CONDUCTING A SMALL-SCALE ‘JUST IN
TIME’ NEEDS ANALYSIS

If you are unsure that the course correctly addresses the learners’
necessities, lacks, and wants, in the first class, ask the learners to complete a
short survey on what they hope to learn in class. Alternatively, or in
In addition to a survey, ask them to produce a sample of their intended
language output and quickly diagnose to what extent they can already
achieve this goal.

• In each class, continue to monitor the learners’ performances and

expressions of motivation. If a new necessity, lack, or want becomes
apparent, be willing and flexible to adjust your teaching accordingly.
 EVALUATING A NEEDS ANALYSIS
Nation and Macalister (2010 ) make the point that a needs analysis must
ultimately be useful in terms of the insights it provides on curriculum design.
If the results from a needs analysis have no application, the endeavor is
effectively worthless.
To ensure the value of a needs analysis, it should be
designed in a similar way to a test, making sure that it is reliable, valid, and
practical ( Brown, 1989 )

For a needs analysis to be reliable, it should produce the same results if

repeated (adjusting, of course, for time).
 CONTENTIOUS ISSUES IN ESP

isn’t a learner survey enough?

current needs of learners and not those that will
be relevant later in their lives.
the problem relates to the instructors’ working environment and their
resulting lack of knowledge and experience of the target field.
EAP environment might have a poor understanding of what their current
needs are.
 RESEARCH IDEAS

Visualizing the terminology of needs analysis

As with many other aspects of ESP, the terminology used to describe the
different facets of needs analysis can be confusing. Review the different
terms used by ESP experts and try to summarize your findings in a clear and
simple diagram or other visualization.
 RESEARCH IDEAS

Reviewing a needs analysis

Review a published account of needs analysis in a journal such as English for

Specific Purposes, ESP Today, or the Journal of English for Academic
Purposes. Evaluate its strengths and weaknesses in terms of the information
it is able to obtain on the necessities, lacks, and wants of different
stakeholders and its reliability, validity, and practicality.
 RESEARCH IDEAS

Conducting a needs analysis

Brown (2016 , p. 33) provides a detailed table of published needs analysis
studies carried out in various EAP and EOP settings. However, it is a
surprising fact that there are still many EAP and EOP settings where the
needs of learners and other stakeholders are largely undocumented.
ASSESSMENT:
What points from the chapter do you think you can
immediately put to use in your own learning or
teaching context?
If you were a learner in an ESP program, would you
want the instructor to reveal to you the extent of
their specialist subject knowledge? Why/Why not?

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