مجلة الآداب و اللغات
Volume 10, Numéro 1, Pages 1-29
2010-10-20
Needs Analysis: A Prior Step To Esp Course Design
Authors : Radia Benmansour Benyelles .
Abstract
The globalisation process has made it necessary to help students getting adapted to today’s competitive society, meaning that needs analysis should be directed so as to help learners for future professional communication and be active participants in their world. In sum, analysing the specific needs of a group of learners serves as the prelude a language course design, because it determines the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the course. Materials designers should explore the learners’ potential needs and hence decide about the process of learning and learning skills needed to be taken into account. Needs analysis provides information about the type of language required during the teaching situation, either in terms of target needs or learning needs. This data will determine the content of the teaching materials. The collected data determine the content of a language programme that will meet these needs. It provides information about the environment of the learning situation It allow the course designer to determine the process of the organisation of the course or materiel, i.e. pedagogic approach. - There is a general agreement that English is the international language of communication that achieves different aims of students, workers….this world status motivates a good number of researchers and scientists to learn English in order to have access to the different documents and references written in English. The availability of a large body of scientific literature written in English facilitates for researchers the retrieval of information from various sources which they can benefit from so as to update academic research and develop their related field of study. The urgent need for a specific proficiency in English has given birth to new approaches, methods and techniques. As a matter of fact, the teaching of English has witnessed the development of ESP to cater for specific needs of the learners. It is thus set for a purely utilitarian purpose (Robinson, 1991). In this vein, Harmer defines ESP as follows: ‘Situations where the student has some specific reasons for wanting to learn a language.’ (Harmer 1983:1) That is to say, the students want to learn the language because they have particular justifications, for instance: to specialise in fields like engineering, banking, accounting and tourism. In a similar way, a researcher may want to undertake some research, while a businessman may wish to interact and carry out business exchanges. Thus ESP is an approach to language learning based on learners’ needs. Its foundation lays in the fact that teacher and planner must investigate the uses to which the language will be put, to determine what these specific purposes are. These needs are then translated into linguistic and pedagogic terms for the production of an effective course. Dudley-Evans (1997) has given an extended definition of ESP in terms of ‘absolute’ and ‘variable’ characteristics as follows:
Keywords
A Prior-Analysis
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