As a teacher it is ultimately up to us to decide what our students should be learning… but on the other hand, it’s also up to the student to let the their teachers know what they could be learning. This is where needs analysis comes into play.
Teachers aren’t mind readers as much as we pretend to be and we will quite often need a kick in the right direction when it comes to understanding our students’ wants and needs. This is particularly the case when it comes to English for Specific Purpose (ESP) classes. It’s fine to teach engineering English, but which engineering? This is one of the things we need to find out and getting that information doesn’t need to be a complicated process.
In fact, it’s as easy as providing your students with a questionnaire of sorts. Things like background information (college department, language experience, L1, how do you use English) act as a nice softener and can lead into language needs (technical reading, instructions, assignment writing, listening to presentations, discussion participation, etc) together with a self-assessment of their English abilities across the four skills (R, W, S, L) together vocabulary knowledge and grammatical understanding. The final section could include how they want materials and classes to be presented. This is something of a formal questionnaire in effect and can be somewhat leading in the answers you receive… so perhaps the better option?
A blank sheet of paper…. Just ask the students to write a short paragraph about their background, language ability and what areas they want to improve. This has the added bonus of giving you some direct feedback on their actual language level as well.
From this feedback it’s possible to perceive which directions the class should be heading in and how the existing syllabus can be tailored to suit this classes specific needs. And voila… everyone should be a happy camper by and large.
(If you want to take it a little further, you can focus a bit more on the students’ learning styles and look at people like Gardner and his Multiple Intelligences – which I will write about later)
