{"id":354,"date":"2014-04-14T16:11:31","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T15:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uefap.com\/blog\/?p=353"},"modified":"2014-04-14T16:11:31","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T15:11:31","slug":"need-analysys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/need-analysys\/","title":{"rendered":"“There really is no need for needs analysis”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hugh Dellar – Twenty Things in Twenty Years<\/h1>\n

At the recent IATEFL conference in Harrogate, Hugh Dellar looked back on 20 years in the classroom and what he had learned. His broadly insightful presentation focused on “20 nuggets of hard-earned wisdom”. You can see it at:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=755gblfOjks<\/a><\/p>\n

This was a very interesting talk and many of the things he has learned in 20 years are similar to things I have realised – and written and talked about – after nearly 40 years in ELT.<\/p>\n

Hugh’s 5th point, though “there really is no need for needs analysis” requires some comment as it is central to what I understand by ESP and EAP.
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Here are some quotations from Hugh:<\/p>\n

“Training novice teachers to give students lists of a few random topics, grammar structures, and maybe lists of different skill areas, and then asking the students to self-diagnose their own ailments – on most general English courses – is fundamentally a mad activity, because most students basically don’t know what they need. Most students will tell you what they need is more grammar…”<\/p>\n

“Here’s what your general English students need. They need repeated exposure to the most frequent words in context. They need a better understanding of how those most frequent words work with other words, and how those most frequent words work with grammar….”<\/p>\n

“Students given a needs analysis form will never tell you this. And it’s time that we stopped wasting the first couple of lessons on this kind of thing in general English classes.”<\/p>\n

I know he clearly says he is talking about General English – whatever that is – but I think my comments are still relevant as I generally agree with Michael Long when he says that all courses, however, general, are still specific.<\/p>\n

General (language for no purpose) courses at any proficiency level almost always teach too much, e.g., vocabulary, skills, registers or styles some learners do not need, and too little, e.g., omitting lexis and genres that they do. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, it is more defensible to view every course as involving specific purposes, the difference in each case being simply the precision with which it is possible to identify current or future uses of the L2 (Long, 2005, p. 19).<\/p>\n

\u00a0And for that reason<\/p>\n

Just as no medical intervention would be prescribed before a thorough diagnosis of what ails the patient, so no language teaching program should be designed without a thorough needs analysis (Long, 2005, p. 1).<\/p>\n

and<\/p>\n

In an era of shrinking resources, there are growing demands for accountability in public life, with education a particularly urgent case and foreign language education a prime example within it. Many secondary school students and, especially, adults with serious academic, occupational, vocational, or ‘survival’ needs for functional L2 proficiency, as well as their sponsors, are increasingly dissatisfied with lessons, materials and methodology developed for someone else or for no-one in particular. There is an urgent need for courses of all kinds to be relevant – and to be seen to be relevant – to the needs of specific groups of learners and of society at large. (Long, 2005, p. 19)<\/p>\n

In a way, I agree with Hugh when he says that\u00a0giving students lists of \u00a0topics, structures, and skill areas and asking them to diagnose their own ailments is “a mad activity”, as students do not know what they need. But if students don’t know what they need<\/em>, they do know what they want<\/em> and we ignore that at our peril. Wasting the first couple of lessons on this is certainly a bad idea, but we do need to find some way to find out where they are coming from and what their expectations are. I have often quoted Graham Gibbs (1981, p. 87) on this:<\/p>\n

… I believe people construct their own worlds. New constructions, new understandings and ways of seeing things, are based on existing constructions and ways of seeing things. I do not see how a person’s understanding can significantly develop without involving their existing conceptions, however crude and “wrong” these are.<\/p>\n

In order to help students learn, we need to understand \u00a0their existing conceptions, however misguided they may be. If we want to be more fashionable, we can then call this negotiation (see, for example, McDevitt, 2004), essential in ESP, but, I would say, also relevant to general English, whatever it is. \u00a0It needs to be done carefully, though, as asking students what they want and then ignoring it is very demotivating!<\/p>\n

Moreover, giving students lists and asking them to choose what they need, though, is a simplistic view of needs analysis. As it is certainly true that students do not know what they need and to some extent that is why they have come to class and are paying us for our expertise. I’m not sure about general English, but in ESP and EAP contexts, the teachers and course designers should know what their students need.<\/p>\n

So what is the purpose of needs analysis. According to Jack Richards (2001), we need needs analysis:<\/p>\n