ESP NEED ANALYSIS by iqbal hussain

1. needs analysis?
 What if not?
 Who decides what to learn?
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 Iqbal hussain

2. 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.

3. How to conduct needs analysis?
 Sources for NAs
 Methods of NA
 What information can we get from
each source and each method?

4. Sources for NAs
 Published & unpublished literature
 Learners
 Teachers & applied linguists
 Domain experts
 Triangulated sources

5. Published & unpublished literature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?

6. 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?

7. 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).

8. 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)

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

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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 don’t interrupt
 Ask the interviewee to reconstruct,
not to remember

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

15. 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?

16. 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

17. 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

18. Approaches to course design: What
is important to a course designer?
 Language-centred course design
 Skills-centred course design
 Learning-centred course design

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. What does it mean to know a
language?

22. Learning-centred course design
 There’s more than just the learner to
consider.
 Concern more on how someone
acquires that competence
 Course design is a negotiated,
dynamic process.

23. 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)

24. Syllabus
 The teacher syllabus
 The classroom syllabus
 The learner syllabus