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Sources for NAs  Published & unpublished literature  Learners  Teachers & applied linguists  Domain experts  Triangulated sources

Published & unpublished literature  detailed job descriptions for employees (from union offices, contracts, sectors, institutions, etc.): manual, lists of tasks, performance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 don ’ t 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  There ’ s 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