Need Analysis

NEED ANALYSIS


INTRODUCTION
         In general terms, need analysis (also called need assessment) refers to the activities involved in gathering information that will serve as the basis information that will serve as the basis developing a curriculum that will meet the learning needs of a particular group of students.
        Need analysis (In the formal and technical sense) is relatively new in language teaching circles. There will be three steps in need analysis:

1. Making basic decisions about the need analysis
2. Gathering Information
3. Using the Information

MAKING BASIC DECISION ABOUT THE NEED ANALYSIS
    Before any need analysis can take place, curriculum planners must make certain fundamental decisions.

WHO WILL BE INVOLVED IN THE NEEDS ANALYSIS?
Four categories of people may become involved in a need analysis; the target group, the audience, the need analysis and the resource group.

1. The target group: is made up those people about whom information will ultimately be gathered.
2. The audience: for a need analysis should encompass all people who will eventually be required to act upon the analysis.
3. The need analysis: are those persons responsible for conducting the need analysis.
4. The resource group: consist of any people who may serve as sources of information about the target group.

WHAT TYPES OF INFORMATION SHOULD BE GATHERED?

According to Stufflebeam, four divergent philosophies can arise in a need analysis: the discrepancy, the democratic, the analytic, and the diagnostic.

1. Discrepancy philosophy is one in which needs are viewed as differences, or discrepancies, between a desired performance from students and what they are actually doing.
2. Democratic philosophy is one in which a need is defined as any change that is desired by a majority of the group involved.
3. Analytic philosophy a need is whatever the students will naturally learn next based on what is known about them and the learning processes involved.

WHICH POINTS OF VIEW SHOULD BE TAKEN

    The philosophy adopted by a particular program or group of needs analysis can clearly affect the types of information gathered in the analysis. Unfortunately many of the needs that are initially perceived as important may not turn out to be so. The point of view taken on each of these dichotomies will in turn be related to and influenced by the philosophy that is dominant in a given program.

Situation Needs Versus Language Needs

    The first dichotomy is one that distinguishes between two types of information found in any language program. Need related to this type of information will be labeled situation needs in this book. The second sort of information is about the target linguistic behaviors that the learners must acquire. These target linguistic behaviors will be labeled language needs. This distinction between situation needs and language needs is not a clear-cut dichotomy because the two categories are often interrelated. When need analysis are confronted with the masses of information that can emerge in a need analysis, keeping the distinction between situation needs and language needs in mind will be particularly useful for sorting through the information and finding useful patterns.

Objective needs versus subjective needs

    Objectives needs are those needs determined on the basis of clear cut, observable data gathered that students must eventually acquire. Subjective needs are generally more difficult to determine because  they have to do “wants”, “desires”, and “expensive”. This distinction between objective needs and subjective needs should not be confused with the two types of data, quantitative and qualitative, that could be gathered on either objective or subjective needs.

Linguistic content vs learning processes

    The linguistic content position tends to favor needs analyzed objectively from a language needs perspective and spelled out in linguistic terms. The learning process position leans toward needs specified from a situation needs perspective. The distinction between content and learning processes is hardly a new one.

HOW MIGHT PHILOSOPHY AND POINTS OF VIEW?

Objective
Learning Processes
Language
Linguistic
Content
Subjective
Situation

A decision regarding one dichotomy in this figure can easily have an effect in the balance chosen for another dichotomy.

        For example, consider what would happen in an analysis if language needs were viewed as much more  important than situation needs. this viewpoint would probably affect the balance taken between objective and subjective needs ( with a resulting shift toward the objective ) as well as the balance between linguistic content and learning process needs ( with a shift toward the linguistic content ).

Although for simplicity's sake I have discussed the three dichotomies as if they are separate, they should be viewed as three interrelated aspects of developing an overall program viewpoint on the types of needs that will be assessed. This decision would in turn have to be consistent with whatever balance of philosophies was selected earlier.

GATHERING INFORMATION

Richards, Platt and Weber (1985, p.189) suggest that a needs assessment seeks information on:

• The situations in which a language will be used (including who it will be used with)
• The objectives and purposes for which the language is needed
• The types of communication that will be used (e.g., written, spoken, formal, informal)
• The level of proficiency that will be required
  
  In the process, the analysts should remain flexible enough to allow for new areas of investigation to develop and old ones to be discarded as the process of needs assessment proceeds. The choices made depend on the philosophy of the needs analysts, as well as their points of view on the various types of information that can be examined. Once all that is clarified, the fundamental techniques used for gathering information are relatively straightforward and such techniques are simple because they all involve, in one way or another, finding answers to relatively simple questions.

TYPES OF QUESTIONS

In the process of gathering information, different types of questions should be considered. Rosset (1982) identified five categories of questions designed to identify the following problems, priorities, abilities, attitudes and solutions.

Problems
The purpose of these questions is to identify the problems that are being experienced by the people under assessment in target group.

Priorities
Questions of priority investigate which topics, language uses, skills, and so on are considered most important for target group to learn. Such questions can be asked of any of the resource groups in the program

Abilities
Abilities questions focus on the student themselves, usually to determine the abilities of the students at entry

Attitudes
Attitude questions are created to uncover information about participants’ feelings and attitudes toward element of program

Solutions
The last class of questions elicits ideas for solutions to perceived problems in terms of what changes might being about compromise and resolution.

TYPES OF INSTRUMENTS

    These types of instruments consists of:

• Existing Information

The purpose of this set of procedures is to utilize any preexisting information that may be available and the existing information can include data sources within a program (such as files or records that may be on hand when the needs analysis begins), or external data courses (such as literary resources or letters exchanged with other existing programs with similar students).

• Tests

Tests can provide a wealth of information about the general ability levels of students , about possible ability groupings that will make sense within a program, about the specific problems that students may be having with the language , and about their achievement in previous programs.

• Observations

This category of instrumentation usually involves watching an individual or small number of individuals, and recording behavior that occur. It is used to get some particular informations.

• Interviews

Interview procedures are fairly open-ended type of instrumentation. There are two kinds of interviews that are individual interviews and group interviews. Individual interviews allow for gathering personal responses and views privately while group interviews might appear to be one way around the time problem, but it is important to remember that the information given in a group interview is not confidential. Indeed, the contrasts in the opinions of people who have been interviewed both individually and in a group format can themselves prove illuminating.

• Meetings

Meetings differ from group interviews in their purpose. Whereas group interviews may help the needs analyst to gather information from the group, meetings are more likely to be structured so that the participants can accomplish certain tasks.

• Questionnaires

Questionnaires can be designed to accomplish any of the following purposes. Biodata surveys are used to elicit facts about the background of each of the participants (students’ age, place of birth, sex, marital status, number of years of language study, and the like).Self ratings procedure requires individuals to rate their own abilities, interest levels, motivation and useful for obtaining practical insights into the self-image of individuals. Participants might also be asked to do judge mental ratings in which they give their evaluation of various aspects of the program. Finally, the Q sort combines several of the procedures defined above because it asks individuals to give their own attitudes, views, and opinions, but also to rank them in terms of importance. Questionnaires of all kinds may turn out to be very useful in gathering large scale information on the needs of students.


SELECTING AND CREATING PROCEDURES
Three characteristics must be considered when using any information – gathering procedures. Only then can the advantages and disadvantages of the different categories of procedures be explored.

Characteristic of Procedures
    The three characteristic of sound information-gathering procedure are reliability, validity, and usability ;

1. Reliability will be defined here as the consistency with which procedure obtains information. Thus reliability must be considered when selecting or creating a procedure for analyzing needs.
2. The validity of a procedure will be defined here as the degree to which is measuring what it claims to measure.
3. The concept of usability must be considered. In most cases, this issues has to do with the degree to which a procedure is practical to use.

Clearly, reliability, validity, and usability are interrelated and should probably be considered to be equally important. In other words, a procedure must logically be reliable, valid, and usable within a given context before it can be effectively used in a need analysis.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Procedures

    All of the procedures discussed here are imperfect, at least to some degree. Fortunately they are imperfect in different ways, that is, each of these procedures has different strengths and different weaknesses. Thus if analysis use various combinations of procedures, they will create a stronger overall information-gathering process. In other words, multiple sources of information should be used in a need analysis-although the specific combination appropriate for a given situation must be decided on the site by the need analysis.

CONSIDERATIONS SPECIFIC TO LANGUAGE NEEDS ANALYSIS

Discourse Analysis

Direct observations and data collection on the language used in particular settings and for specific purposes may prove useful in studying students’ language needs.

One way of using discourse analysis to study students’ needs is described in the elaborate model provided in Munby (1978,pp.190-98). He suggests the following nine parameters as the framework for a needs analysis.

Participants;  biographical facts and language background
Purposive domain: the specific purposes for which the language will be used
Setting: physical and psychosocial characteristics of the setting
Interaction: the social relationships involved
Instrumentality: medium, mode, and channel of communication
Dialect: regional, class, and temporal
Target level : language characteristics required and under what conditions
Communicative event: events and functions
Communicative key: attitude and tone

In general, Munby’s framework emphasizes the subjective side of needs analysis because it relies heavily on the analyst’s institution. Nevertheless, it offers a useful framework for observing and sorting through information about types of discourse that student will eventually  need to use.

Text Analysis

If the learners will encounter the target language primarily in print -  that is , for purposes of reading or writing – text analysis may help in determining what the students will ultimately have to read or write. Many different genres and types of texts may come under scrutiny (for example, scientific discourse, newspaper editorials, or social science journal articles) in this form of analysis. Again , the units of analysis chosen ( for instance, cohesive devices, rhetorical features, readability, or vocabulary) will tend to reflect  the need analysts’ understandings of the nature of different kinds of texts and the analysts’ belief systems with the regard to the nature of language and language learning.


EXAMPLE NEEDS ANALYSES

Guangzhou English Language Center, Zhongshan University

• Existing information
• Tests
• Observations
• Meetings
• Questionnaires

English Language Institute, University of Hawaii at Manoa

• Literature review
• Initial survey
• Case studies
• Questionnaires
• Meetings
• Summarizing the results