Why needs analysis?

1. Why needs analysis? • What if not? • Who decides what to learn?

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 Sources for NAs • Published & unpublished literature • Learners • Teachers & applied linguists • Domain experts • Triangulated sources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 Published & unpublished literature • detailed job descriptions for employees (from union offices, contracts, sectors, institutions, etc.): manual, lists of tasks, performance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