Needs Analysis

1. Needs Analysis Rio Darmasetiawan (69100077)

2. What does it mean? • General terms: the activities invovled in gathering information as the basis for developing a curriculum • Formal terms: “the process of determining the needs for which a learner or group of learners requires a language and arranging the needs according to priorities” (Richard, Platt, Webber, 1985); “an array of procedures for identifying and validating needs, and establishing priorities among them.” (Pratt, 1980)

3. How do we conduct it? Three basic steps to do it: • Making basic decisions about the needs analysis • Gathering information • Using the information

4. Making basic decisions about the needs analysis Four categories of people may involve in it: • Target group: the main source of information. Ex: the students • Audience: the supporting personnels. Ex: teachers, program admins, supervisors • Needs analysts: the thinker+doer. Ex: members of faculty designated for the job • Resource group: the source of information about the taregt group. Ex: parents, guardians

5. Four philosophies in determining the types of information: • The discrepancy philosophy: needs viewed as differences between a desired performance from the students and their actual performance • The democratic philosophy: any change desired by a majority of the group involved • The analytic philosophy: whatever needed to learn next based on the hierarchical steps involved in the learning process • The diagnostic philosophy: anything proved harmful if missing

6. Three basic dichotomies to narrow the choices of what to investigate: • Situation needs VS Language Needs • Situation needs: deal with human’s aspects such as the physical, social, and psychological context • Language needs: refer to the language behavior the learnes must ultimately acquire such as the language competence, reasons for studying the language, etc

7. Objective Needs VS Subjective Needs • Objective needs: needs determined on the basis of observable data gathered about the situation, the learners, the proficiency and skills levels, etc • Subjective needs: based on “wants,” “desires,” and “expectations” (Brindley, 1984) • Linguistic Content VS Learning Process • Linguistic content: favors needs analyzed objectively from a language needs perspective • Learning process: leans towards needs specified from a situations needs perspective (more subjectively analyzed in the affective domain)

8. Gathering Information Different types of questions to consider: • Problems • Have to do with problems • To identify the problems • Open-ended & exploratory • Priorities • Investigates the most important subjects to learn • Can be asked of any of the resource groups

9. Abilities • Focus on the students themselves • To determine the ability of the students • Attitudes • To uncover information about participants’ feelings and attitudes toward elements of the program • Solutions • Elicits ideas for solutions to perceived problems

10. Types of instruments: • Existing Information • Utilize any preexisting information • Include internal or external data sources • Tests • Indispensable source of information • 4 different purposes: proficiency, placement, diagnosis, achievement • Observations • Watching an individual or a small number of individuals & recording the behaviors occur • The behaviors are, normally, language and classroom behaviors • Types of procedures in observations: case study, diary study, behavior observation,interactional study & inventory

11. Interviews • Open-ended type of insturmentation • Two types of interviews: individual & group interviews • Meetings • More structured to accomplish certain tasks • Four types of meetings: the delphy techniques, advisory meeting, interest group meeting, review meetings • Questionnaires • More efficient for gathering information on a large scale • Kinds of questionnaires: biodata surveys, opinion surveys, self-ratings, judgmental ratings, Q sort

12. Selecting & Creating Procedures Three characteristics to consider when using any information-gathering procedures: • Reliability: the consistency • Validity: the aim • Usability: the practicality

13. Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Procedures • Observations of human behavior are never perfect • Various combinations of procedures will create a stronger overall information-gathering process • Multiple sources of information should be used in a needs analysis

14. Considerations Specific to Language Needs Analysis • Discourse analysis • Direct observations & data collection on the language may prove useful in studying students’ language needs • Munby (1978) suggests the parameters as the framework for a needs analysis: • Participant • Purposive domain • Setting • Interaction • Instrumentality • Dialect • Target level • Communicative event • Communicative key

15. Text Analysis • If the learners will encounter the target language primarily in print, text analysis may help • It reflects the needs analysts’ understandings of the nature of different kidns of texts and the analysts’ belief systems with regard to the nature of language and language learning • The analysts’ biases will definitely affect the results of needs analyses in general and text analysis in particular