Need Analysis

INTRODUCTION

Needs analysis Gin the formal and technical sense) is relatively new in lan- guage teaching circles. However, needs ar.alyses have been conducted informally for years by teachers who wanted to assess what language points their students needed to learn. Indeed, the various activities I labeled "approaches" in the pre- vious chapter are different expressions of this desire to figure out what students need to learn. Information sources for such informal needs assessments might include scores on an overall language proficiency test, facts gathered from e background questionnaire that asks where and for how long students have had previous language training, or impressions gleaned from teacher and student interviews about the students' cognitive and linguistic abilities. Thus, two points seem immediately obvious when thinking about needs analysis.

First, informal needs analysis is not a new thing; indeed, good teachers since the birth of the teaching profession have been conducting some form of needs assessment. Sec ond, needs analysis involves the gathering of information to find out how much the students already know and what they still need to learn. n more formal terms, needs assessment is defined by Richards, Platt, and Weber (1985, p. 189) as "the process of determining the needs for which a learner or group of learners requires a language and arranging the needs accord ing to priorities. Needs assessment makes use of both subjective and objective information (e.g., data from questionnaires, tests, interviews, observation). The definition then goes on to prescribe topic areas on which informetion should be obtained. These will be discussed below.

Notice that the needs described in this definition are those of the learners involved and also notice that the students' language requirements are to be delirn eated and sequenced In another definition of needs assessment, Stufflebeam, McCormick, Brinker hoff, and Nelson (1985, p. 16) point out that it is "the process of determining the thirgs that ere necessary or useful for the fulfillment of a defensible purpose." A key phrase in this broader definition is "defensible purpose." This definition is attractive because it implies that the needs that are isolated must be defensible and form a unified and justifiable purpose.

Pratt (1980, p. 79) states that "needs assessment refers to an array of proce dures for identifying and validating needs, and establishing priorities among them." The key phrases that make this definition different from the others are "array of procedures" and "validating needs." The first phrase indicates that a variety of information-gathering tools should be used. The second implies that needs are not absolute, that is, once they are identified, they continually need to be examined for validity to ensure that they remain real needs for the students involved.

In order to accomplish all this and actually perform a needs aralysis, certain systematic steps must be followed. The remainder of this chapter will elaborate on these steps and provide suggestions for a reasonable set of procedures and steps to accomplish each. There will be three basic steps:

1. Making basic decisions about the needs analysis

2. Gathering information

3. Using the information

Making Basic Decisions about the Needs Analysis

A. Who Will Be Involved In The Needs Analysis

Four categories of people may become involved in a needs analysis: the target group, the audience, the needs analysts themselves, and the resource group. While certain individuals may find themselves playing roles in several of these categories, the roles are quite different even when the same person occupies more than one.

The target group is made up of those people about whom information will ultimately be gathered. The usual target group is the students in a program, but sometimes the teachers and/or administrators are also targeted.

The audience for a needs analysis should encompass all people who will eventually be required teachers, teacher aides, program administrators, and any governing bodies or supervisors in the bureaucracy above the language program.

The needs analysts are those persons responsible for conducting the needs analysis. They may be consultants brought in for the purpose, or members of the faculty designated for the job. In addition to conducting the needs analysis, this group will probably be responsible for identifying the other three groups. The needs analysts as individuals and as a group must be willing to divide up, share, and delegate responsibilities or the entire needs assessment process may prove unrealizable.

The resource group consists of any people who may serve as sources of infor- mation about the target group. In some contexts, parents, financial sponsors, or guardians may be included as sources of valuable information about the target group. In other cases, outsiders (such as future employers or professors from the students' content courses) may provide valuable information about the target language that students will eventually need to use.

B. What Types of Information Should Be Gathered?

       Four Philosophies Of Need Analysis

For instance, the discrepancy philosophy is one in which need: are viewed as differences, or discrepancies, between a desired perfor mance from the students and what they are actually doing. This night lead to gathering detailed information about what is needed to change students' perfor mance based on the observed difference between the desired correct pronuncia tion of the English phoneme /p/ and the incorrect phoneme /b/ the students are producing in place of it . A discrepancy can, of course, also be considerably broader and more complex, as in a need to change students' abilities in acade mic English from an existing low level to a level sufficient for success in a British university.

The democratic philosophy is one in which a need is defined as any change that is desired by a majority of the group involved. Whether this group consisted of the students themselves, their teachers, program administrators, or the own ers of a private, for-profit language school, the democratic philosophy would lead to a needs analysis that would gather information about the learning most desired by the chosen group(s).

In the analytic philosophy a need is whatever the students will naturally learn next based on what is known about them and the learning processes involved: that is, the students are at stage x in their language development, and they next need to learn x + 1 or whatever is next in the hierarchy of language development Thus this philosophy might lead to a survey of the existing literature on second language acquisition in search of the hierarchical steps involved in the language learning process.

Finally, a diagnostic philosophy proposes that a need is anything that would prove harmful if it was missing. This philosophy might lead to an analysis of the important language skills necessary for immigrants to survive in their adopted country. Thus a study might be conducted concerning the daily needs of immi- grants and then be extended to the types of language required to accomplish such survival needs.

C. Which Point of View Should Be Taken?

The point of view taken on cach of these dichotomies will in turn be related to and infla emced by the philosophy that is dominant in a given program.

1. Situation Needs Versus Language Needs

            The first dichotomy is one that distinguishes between two types of information found in any language program. Some information will center on the program's baspects, that is, the physical, social, and psychological learming takes place. Needs related to this type of information will be labeled Mo ereds in this book. Such needs are usually related to any administrate francial, logistical, manpower, pedagogic, religious, cultural, personal, facton that might have an impact on the program. The second sort of information is about the target linguistic behaviors that Situation Needs Versus Language Needs contexts in which ultimately acquire. These target linguistic behaviors wil be labeled language needs in this book. Information in this category would include deails about the circumstances in which the language willl be used, the dimen- sions of language competence involved, the learners' reasons for studying the anguage, their present abilities with respect to those reasons, and so forth.

2. Objective Needs Versus Subjective Needs

Brindley (1984) provides another dichotomy related to the types of information in a needs analysis: objective needs versus subjective needs. Objective needs ate those needs determined on the basis of clear-cut, observable data gathered about the situation, the learners, the language that students must eventually acquire their present proficiency and skill levels, and so forth. Subjective needs are gener- ally more difficult to determine because they have to do with "wants," "desires, and "expectations" (Brindley 1984, p. 31). This distinction between objective needs and subjective needs should not be confused with the two types of data,quantitative and qualitative, that could be gathered on either objective or subjective needs. In other words, quantitative data can be gathered objective needs, and so too can qualitative data. The distinction between objective and subjective needs has to do with the observability of the needs, not with the type of data that are gathered on them. For instance, students' "wants" and "desires" can be quantiied in a questionnaire, but can they be observed objectively?

As is the case with situation needs and language needs, needs analysts will probably want to use information about both subjective needs and objective needs. The balance that is struck will affect many other fundamental choices in the needs analysis process, for example, which instruments and procedures to use, how to employ them, which results to believe, which to discard, and so on.

3. Linguistic Content Versus Learning Processed

Another dichotomy that is important to keep in mind while sorting through the information in a needs analysis is that between specifying needs in terms of the content that the students must learn versus specifying needs in terms of learning processes. The linguistic content position tends to favor needs analyzed objec tively from a language needs perspective and spelled out in linguistic terms, whether they be phonemes, morphemes, grammatical structures, case rules, utterances, functions, notions, discourse markers, or whatever. The learning process position leans toward needs specified from a situation needs perspective these tend to be more subjectively analyzed needs in the affective domain, such as motivation and self-esteem. The distinction between content and learning processes is hardly 2) dichotomy between the "goal-oriented definition of needs" and the "process oriented definition of needs"; or between Brindley's (1984, pp. 31-32) "language content" and "learning content" duality; or between Nunan's (1985) "content and "methodology" parameters. Regardless of the label applied, responsible needs analysts will use whatever is valuable in both positions, drawing e strengths of both as appropriate for the program in question.

D. How Might Philosophy and Points of View Interact?

The philosophies and dichotomies have been presented here in such a way that none is advocated over the others because the decisions about which roads to follow in a particular language program depend on the personalities and inst tutions affecting that program. Nonetheless, early decisions about these issues can save an enormous amount of backtracking, wasted energy, and frustration.

Selecting and Creating Procedures

1) Characteristic of Procedures

There are three characteristic of sound information:

a) Reliability

Reliability will be defined here as the consistency with which a procedure obtains information. Any procedure whether it be a ruler for measuring length, a scale for determining weight, or a questionnaire for ascertaining attitudes should obtain approximately the same results every time it’s used to measure the same person or object.

b) Validity

Validity of a procedure will be defined here as the degree to which it is measuring what it claims to measure. If a questionnaire purports to be a measure of the level of student motivation, it’s important that it be just that, not a reflection of something entirely different.

c) Usability

Usability must be considered. In most cases, this issue has to do with the degree to which a procedure is practical to use. Is it relatively easy to administer, to score, and interpret.

For example, in conducting a language need analysis for a group of workers on an oil rig, the analysis may want to gather data on the actual language used in communication between foremen and workers on the rig site.

This characteristic is very important. In other words, procedure must logically be reliable, valid, and usable within a given context before it can be effectively used in a need analysis.

2) Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Procedures

Fortunately, they are imperfect in different ways, that is, each of these procedures has different strengths and different weaknesses. Thus if analysis use various combinations of procedures, they will create a stronger overall information gathering process. In other words, multiple sources of information should be used in a need analysis although the specific combination appropriate for a given situation must be decided on the site by the need analysis themselves.

Considerations Specific to Language Need Analysis

1) Discourse Analysis

Direct observations and data collection on the language used in particular settings and for specific purposes may prove useful in studying students language needs. Examples of such settings and purposes include the language used on oil rigs (discussed above), for jobs interviews, for university lectures, and in doctor patient encounters. One way of using discourse analysis to study students needs is described in the elaborate model provided in Munby (1998, pp. 190-98). He suggests the following nine parameters as the framework for a need analysis:

a) Participant: biographical facts and language background.

b) Purposive domain: the specific purposes for which the language will be used.

c) Setting: physical and psychosocial characteristic of the setting

d) Interaction: the social relationships involved.

e) Instrumentality: medium, mode, and channel of communication.

f) Dialect: regional, class, and temporal.

g) Target level: language characteristics required and under what conditions.

h) Communicative event: event and functions.

2) Text Analysis

If the learners will encounter the target language primarily in print that is, for purposes of reading or writing text analysis may help in determining what the students will ultimately have to read or write. Many different genres and types of texts may come under scrutiny.

(For example, scientific discourse, newspaper editorials, or social science journal articles) in this form of analysis. Again, the units of analysis chosen (for instance, cohesive devices, rhetorical features, readability, or vocabulary) will tend to reflect the need analysis understandings of the nature of different kinds of text and the analysis belief systems with regard to the nature of language and language learning.

Target Situation Analysis

Needs analysis is divided into 3 things.  First, analyzing the needs of the target situations of the use of English for learners both in the short term (the situation of the use of English for academic interests and or while the learner is still in study) and the long term (situations of the use of English that are used when working).  This analysis also reveals learners' responses and behavior towards these situations.  This analysis includes the linguistic items used, what the scope of the material is, with whom the learner will use this language, where this language is used, and when this language will be used.

Example Need Analysis

Needs assessment instruments and procedures discussed earlier generate a large quantity and a wide variety of data. Such informationprovides a useful starting point for developing or evaluating a language program. I should stress, however, that data have little meaning in themselves. Data must be ana lyzed, interpreted, and evaluated before the resulting information can be applied to the practical realities of curriculum development. The applications of infor mal and formal needs analysis that were conducted at GELC and in the ELI at UHM should help to clarify how such needs analysis information can be used. However, the actual uses to which such information will be put in other pro- grams may vary tremendously.

GUANGZHOU ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTER, ZHONGSHAN UNIVERSITY

1) Existing Information

planning activities with our Chinese colleagues, a In preparation for the summer number of the American faculty had taken a course at UCLA on English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which had helped us to locate and sort through the literature on the topic.

2) Tests

We also knew, in very general terms, what to expect from the students who would be coming to GELC. By agreement with the Ministry of Education, the students had all been tested on a reduced version of the UCLA English as a Second Language Placement Examination (ESLPE), from which we were able to estimate the students' proficiency levels in terms of TOEFL scores. Initially, only students with estimated TOEFL scores higher than 450 were accepted.

3) Observations

At UCLA we were also in a position to do some useful observations of our own. For instance, during much of 1980 two teams consisting of three graduate students in the TESL master's degree program at UCLA were engaged in analyzing lecture discourse and reading texts in engineering English for the purpose of developing tests. This process involved doing interviews and holding meetings with engineering professors and students.

4) Meetings

Consonant with Chinese traditions, meetings were a dominant and useful part of gathering information on the needs of our students. These included weekly teachers meetings, regular seminars/workshops to discuss ESP issues, weekly meetings for each skill area, and weekly meetings for the multiple sections of each course.

5) Questionnaires

One particularly useful result of these student representative meetings was a bilingual questionnaire that was developed jointly by the teachers and the stu dent representatives. This questionnaire was designed to investigate the students' attitudes toward various aspects of the program-particularly materials, teach ing, and logistical issues.

REFERENCE

Hamalik,   Oemar.   2007. Dasar-DasarPengembanganKurikulum.   Bandung:   RemajaRosdakarya.

            James Down Brown.  1995. The Elements Of Language Curriculum. Universitas Hawai at manoa: HEINLE & HEINLE PUBLISHERS.