Need Analysis in ELT Curriculum Development
INTRODUCTION
In general terms, need analysis ( also called need assessment ) refers to the activities involved in gathering information that will serve as the basis for developing a curriculum that will meet the learning needs of a particular group of students. In the case of language programs, those needs will be language related. Need analysis was introduced into language teaching through the ESP
movement . From the 1960’s, the demand for specialized language programs grew and applied linguists increasingly began to employ needs analysis procedures in language teaching. By the 1980’s, in many parts of the world a “needs-based philosophy” emerged in language teaching, particularly in relation to ESP and vocationally oriented program design. More formal terms, need analysis is defined by Richard Platt and Weber as “ the process of determining the needs foe which a learner or groups or learners requires a language and arranging the needs according to priorities.”Need analysis (in the formal and technical sense) is relatively new in language teaching circles. However, need analysis have been conducted informally for years by teachers who wanted to assess what language points their students needed to learn.
Definition of need analysis
Stufflebearn,McCormick, Brinkerholf and Nelson(1985) point out that need analysis is “the process of determining the things that are necessary or useful for the fulfillment of a defensible purpose”
Pratt (1980) states that the need assessment refers to an array of procedures for identifying and validating needs, and establishing priorities among them.
In some language programs, informal need assessment is a part of a teachers ongoing responsibilities. Shaw and Dowsett(1986) describe this approach in the Australian Adult Migrant Education Program:
Informal need analysis deals with the informal negotiations that take place between class teachers and students, in the form of chats with either individual students, groups of students, or the whole class in order to select a focus for the classs and create group cohesion by establishing a coincidence of learning needs.
……Informal need analysis is normally the main task of the classroom teacher during week one of the course….[it] is a necessary component of information retrieval on students’ learning needs and should be recorded. It can subsequently be used as an input for aims and objectives setting and for devising course outlines.
Need analysis refers to a family of procedures for gathering information about learners and about communication tasks for use in syllabus design.
The objectives of needs analysis
Objectives needs are 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 generally more difficult to determine because they have to do with wants, desire and expectations. This distinction between objective needs should not be confused with the two types ofdata, Quantitative and qualitative, that could be gathered on either subjective needs. In other words, quantitative data can be gathered on both subjective and objective needs, and so too qualitative data. The distinction between objective and subjective needs has to do with the observability of the needs noth with the type of data that are gathered on them. For instance, the students wants and desires can be quantified in a questionnaire, but can they be observed objectively?
As is the case with situation needs and language needs, need analysis will probably want to use information about both subjective need 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 in use, how to employ them, which result to be believe and so on.
The Users of Needs Analysis
A need analysis may e conducted for a variety of different users. For example, in conducting a need analysis to help revise the secondary school English curriculum in a country, the end users include
§ Curriculum officers in the ministry of education, who may wish to use the information to evaluate the adequacy of existing syllabus, curriculum and materials.
§ Teachers who will teach from the new curriculum
§ Learners, who will be taught from the curriculum
§ Writers, who are preparing new text books
§ , who are involved in developing end-of-school assessment
§ Staff or tertiary institutions, who are interested in knowing what the expected level will be of students exiting the schools and what problems they face.
With small scale need analysis such as that carried out by a single teacher on his or her class, the audience might consist of teacher , other teachers and the program coordinator. In cases of large need analysis, there will be multiple audiences for the results of need analysis. Determining the likely audiences is an important first step in planning a need analysis in order to ensure that the information they need is obtained and that the needs analysis will have the impact it is designed to have. Stuffle -bearn point out that ‘’ it is important to remember that not all key audiences are likely to e identified at the start of a study’’. Also, its entirely possible that that the relative importance of various audiences will change during the study.
Needs analysis can thus have a political dimension. It can be used to support a particular agenda, for example, by giving priority to one group to the exclusion of others within a population or in order to justify a decision that has already been made on economic or other grounds. For example, an employer might want to use information from a need analysis to justify replacing certain staff rather than investing in providing for retraining. In any situation where need analysis is being undertaken, there are thus different stakeholders, that is, those who have a particular interest or involvement in the issues or programs that are being examined, and it is important to try to get a sense of what their different agendas are. Connelly and Clandinin (1988,124) define a stakeholder as a person or group of persons with a right to comment on, and have input into, the curriculum process offered in schools.
The purpose of needs analysis
Needs analysis in language teaching may be used for a number of different purposes, for example:
v To find out what language skills a learner needs in order to perform a particular, such as sales manager, tour guide, or university students
v To help determine if an existing course adequately addresses the needs of potential students
v To determine which students from a group are most in need of training in particular language skills
v To identify a change of direction that people in reference group feel is important
v To identify a gap between what student are able to do and what they need to be able to do
v To collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing
The target of need analysis
The target population in a needs analysis refers to the people about whom information will be collected. For example, in conducting a need analysis to determine the focus of an English program in public secondary school in an EFL context, the target population might be :
§ Policy makers
§ Ministry of education officials
§ Teachers
§ Students
§ Academic
§ Employers
§ Vocational training specialists
§ Parents
§ Influential individuals and pressure groups
§ Academic specialists
§ Community agencies
In determining the target population, an important issue is that of sampling. In some cases, the population is small enough for every learner to be included in the sample. In other cases, this approach is not feasible and so decision must be made about the size of the sample to e included in a need analysis. Sampling involves asking a portion of the potential population instead of the total population and seeks to create a sample that is representative of the total population. Elley (1984) points out that a number of factor influence the approach to sampling, such as homogeneity of the population in terms of the kinds of skills, attitudes, or knowledge being sought or the need to study subgroups within the sample-for example, based on sex, language group, or other factors. Where the target population is large, specialized advice is often needed to determine what approach to sampling best suits the purpose of the study and the sources of information available.
Procedures for conducting need analysis
A variety of procedures can be used in conducting need analysis and the kind of information obtained is often dependent on the type procedure selected. Since any one source of information is likely to be incomplete or partial, a triangular approach(i.e., collecting information from two or more sources) is advisable.
Roles, Instrument and Procedures for need analysis (adapted from Brown 1989a)
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