Why needs analysis?

What if not?
Who decides what to learn?

Needs Analysis: A Key Issue to ESP

Course Design and Material Writing

learners survival needs (academic, occupational,

vocational )
Problems: oversimplified language, inauthentic
communicative structure, unrealistic situational
content, etc.

How to conduct needs analysis?

Sources for NAs
Methods of NA
What information can we get from
each source and each method?

Sources for NAs

Published & unpublished literature

Learners
Teachers & applied linguists
Domain experts
Triangulated sources

Published & unpublished literature

detailed job descriptions for
employees (from union offices,
contracts, sectors, institutions, etc.):
manual, lists of tasks, performance
standards, training exercises
Do they contain any specific
language to be used while doing
the task?

Learners
pre-experience learners (unreliable?)
experienced in-service learners
What information can they provide?
Do they have enough knowledge
about the content of the job and
language needs?
Are they familiar enough with a
target discourse domain to provide
usable, valid information?

Teachers & applied linguists

What do they know better than
domain experts?
Many studies show serious
mismatches of understanding
between applied linguists and domain
experts (Huckin & Olsen, 1984;
Selinker, 1979; Zuck & Zuck, 1984).

Domain experts
What do they know better than
teachers and applied linguists?
What about their knowledge of
language needs?
(unreliable both on detailed linguistic
level & discourse events)

Triangulated sources
Combining domain experts and
language experts in a team can
produce successful task-based
language NAs (Lett, 2005).

Methods of NA
Non-expert & expert intuitions
Interviews
Participant observation & non
participant observation
Questionnaires
Triangulated methods

Non-expert & expert intuitions

non-expert intuitions (common for
many commercial textbook writers):
being notoriously unreliable on the
language of target situations
expert intuitions: not clear whether
domain experts can do any better.

Interviews
Structured

semi-structured

unstructured/open-ended

Unstructured interviews: time-consuming, no fixed

format, allowing in-depth coverage of issues than the
use of pre-determined questions, categories and
response options
once unstructured interviews are done and the data
from them analyzed, semi-structured or structured
interviews may follow.

Interviews
Establishing access to, making
contact with and selecting
interviewees
Interviewing as a relationship
listen more, talk less
follow up on what the interviewee
says, but dont interrupt
Ask the interviewee to reconstruct,
not to remember

Interviews
keep the interviewee focused and ask
for concrete details
do not take the ebbs and flows of
interviewing too personally
follow your hunches

Participant observation & non

participant observation
non participant observation: no
involvement with the people or activities
studied (collecting data by observation
alone)
participant observation: degree of
involvement
Can we get specific languages from it?

Questionnaires
might be designed for broad coverage
of representative members and
numbers of each category
specific, measureable objectives
choice of population or sample
reliable and valid instruments

Triangulated methods
A questionnaire, used as the basis for
in-depth structured interviews, etc.
Lots of introspection & retrospection
needed to be cross-checked against
results of participant observation &/or
non participant observation of actual
language use

Approaches to course design: What

is important to a course designer?
Language-centred course design
Skills-centred course design
Learning-centred course design

Language-centred course design

The learner is used as a means of identifying the
target situation/a way of locating the language area.
The analysis of target situation data is at the surface
level.
viewing learning a logical, straightforward
teaching as an externally-imposed (p.68)
Learning needs are not accounted (e.g., motivational
attitude of the students).
Too much focusing on language data, itself, not taking
being interesting into account.
Designing process is static, inflexible.

Skills-centred course design

taking the learner needs more into account than the
language-centred approach
viewing any language behavior as skills and
strategies, which the learner uses in order to produce
or comprehend discourse
focusing more on performance and competence
viewing the learner as a user of language rather than
as a learner of language
the teaching and learning process focus more on
language use, not language learning.

What does it mean to know a

language?

Learning-centred course design

Theres more than just the learner to
consider.
Concern more on how someone
acquires that competence
Course design is a negotiated,
dynamic process.

Syllabus
The evaluation syllabus: listing what should
be learnt (official assumption)
The organizational syllabus: stating the
order of items to be learnt (the contents
page of a textbook)
The materials syllabus: how learning will be
achieved (e.g., how vocabulary items are
presented in texts to involve more learners
attention)

Syllabus
The teacher syllabus
The classroom syllabus
The learner syllabus