Analysing Needs

2
Analysing Needs
2.1 Introduction
This chapter discusses the importance of needs analysis in ESP and describes
how teachers and course developers set about investigating needs. The first sec-
tion defines needs analysis. The second section presents and discusses a set of
hypothetical scenarios in which ESP courses were set up without a careful inves-
tigation of needs. The third section describes the role of needs analysis in course
design. The fourth section suggests ways ESP course developers and teachers
can use published needs analyses to help them investigate needs in their own
contexts. The final section outlines the various types of information that can be
collected in a needs analysis project.
2.2 Definitions of needs analysis
ESP courses set out to teach the language and communication skills that specific
groups of language learners need or will need to function effectively in their
disciplines of study, professions or workplaces. Because ESP focuses on teaching
specific language and communication skills, ESP course design usually includes
a stage in which the course developers identify what specific language and skills
the group of language learners will need. The identification of language and
skills is used in determining and refining the content for the ESP course. It can
also be used to assess learners and learning at the end of the course. This process
is termed ‘needs analysis’.
Over the years needs analysis has become increasingly sophisticated. In the
early years of ESP, needs analysis tended to be construed as a fairly simple pre-
course procedure involving analysis of the target situation. However, this is no
longer the case (Garcia Mayo, 2000; Tajino, James and Kijima, 2005). Read the
two definitions below. The first appeared in the initial volume of the journal
English for Specific Purposes in 1980 and the second appeared in 1998.
17
H. Basturkmen, Developing Courses in English for Specific Purposes

© Helen Basturkmen 2010
18 Developing Courses in English for Specific Purposes
How has the notion of needs analysis in ESP been expanded?
1. Chambers (1980):
Needs analysis should be concerned with the establishment of communi-
cative needs and their realisations, resulting from an analysis of the com-
munication in the target situation – what I will refer to as target situation
analysis.
2. Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) offer a ‘current concept of needs analysis’

(p. 125):
A. Professional information about the learners: The tasks and activities
learners are/will be using English for – target situation analysis and objec-
tive needs.
B. Personal information about the learners: Factors which may affect the
way they learn such as previous learning experiences, cultural informa-
tion, reasons for attending the course and expectations of it, attitude to
English – wants, means and subjective needs.
C. English language information about the learners: What their current
skills and language use are – present situation analysis – which allows us
to assess (D).
D. The learners’ lacks: The gap between (C) and (A) – lacks.
E. Language learning information: Effective ways of learning the skills and
language in (D) – learning needs.
F. Professional communication information about (A): Knowledge of how
language and skills are used in the target situation – linguistic analysis,
discourse analysis, genre analysis.
G. What is wanted from the course.
H. Information about how the course will be run – means analysis.
West (1997, pp. 70–1) reports on the expanding concept of needs analysis and
uses the metaphor of a journey to describe the elements involved. In the early
days needs analyses focused largely on necessities or objective needs representing ‘the
destination of the learner’s journey’. These analyses aimed to determine priorities,
such as, which skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking), and which situations
or tasks, such as speaking on the telephone or writing minutes from meetings,
were more or less important in the target situation. Later the concept of needs
analysis was expanded to include ‘deficiency analysis’ (lacks or the gap between
what the learner needs to know to operate in the target situation and the learner’s
present language proficiency). This analysis represented the point of departure for
the language-learning journey. In time ‘strategy analysis’ (the preferred approaches
and methods in teaching and learning) was also included in needs analysis. This
represented the means of travel. And later ‘means analysis’ (identification of the
constraints and opportunities in the teaching situation) was added. This analysis
included gathering information on the classroom culture, learner factors, teacher

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2

2.2 Definitions of needs analysis

H. Basturkmen, Developing Courses in English for Specific Purposes

How has the notion of needs analysis in ESP been expanded?

2. Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) offer a ‘current concept of needs analysis’

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