Now i will explain to you about Need analysis....
What should the teacher do before teaching ?
Why teacher need to do need analysis?
For more explenation, lets see the discussion below.............
DISSCUSSION
NEED
ANALYSIS
Need
analysis refers to activities involved in gathering information that will serve
as the basis for developing a curriculum that will meet the learning needs of a
particular group of students. Need analysis is retalively new in language
teaching circles. Need analysis have been conducted informally for years by
teacher who wanted to assess what the language points their students needed to
learn.
One
basic assumptions of curriculum developments is
that a sounds educational
program should be based on an analysis of learners’ needs. Procedures used to
collect information about learners’ need are known as need analysis. If
providers of training programs wanted public or other sources of funding in
order to provide different kinds of training programs, they were required to
demonstrate that a proposed a response to a genuine need. Need analysis was
introduced into language teaching through the ESP movement.
The
purposes of need analysis :
a. To
find out what language skill a learner need in order to perform a particular
role, such as sales manager, tour guide, or university student
b. To
help determine if an existing course adequately addresses the needs of
potential students
c. To
determine which student from a group are most in need of training in particular
language skills
d. To
identify a change of direction that people in a reference group feel is
important
e. To
identify a gap between what student are able to do and what they need to be
able to do
f. To
collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing
Leaners are not consulted as to whether they
perceive a need for such knowledgr. Their needs have been decided for them by
those concerned with their long-term welfare. Needs analysis thus invludes the
study of perceived and present needs as well as potential and unrecognized
needs. Need analysis may take place prior to, during, or after a language
program. Much of the literature on need analysis is based on assumption that is
is part of the planning that takes places as part of the development of a
course. It assumes that time and resources are available to plan, collect, and
analyze relevant information for a planned program of instruction
A.
What
are the learners need ?
Needs are often described in terms of a linguistic
deficiency, that is as describing the difference between what a learner can
presently do in a language and what he or she should be able to do. This
suggests that needs have objective reality and are simply the waiting to be
identified and analyzed. Auerbach (1995,9) has pointed out that English
language teaching has often been viewed as a \ “ neutral transfer odf skills,
knowledge, or competencies” and that such an approach is based on the needs of
social intitutions, rather than language learners, and ignores questions of
power : “ pedagogical choices about curriculum development, content, materials,
classroom process, and language use, although appearing to be informed by
apolitical professional considerations are in fact inherently ideological in
nature, with significant implications for learners socioeconomic”
B.
Who
will be involved in the needs analysis ?
Four categories of people may become involved in a
needs analysis :
1. The
target group, is made up of those people about whom information will ultimately
be gathered. The usual target group is the students in a program, but sometimes
the teachers and/ or administrator are
also targeted.
2. The
audience for a needs analysis should enompass all people who will eventually be
required to act upon the analysis. This group usually consist of teachers,
teachers aides, program administrators, and any governing bodies or supervisors
in bureaucracy above the language program.
3. The
needs analysis are those persons responsible for conducting the needs analysis.
They may be consultants brought in for the purpose, or members of the faculty
designated for the job. In addition to conducting the needs analysis, this
group will probably be responsible for identifying the others three groups.
4. The
resource group consist of many people who may serve as source of information
about the targer group. In some contexts, parents, financial sposors, or
guardians may be included as source of valuable information about the target
group.
The users of needs
analysis
A
need analysis may be conducted for a variety of different users. For example,
in conducting a needs analysis to help revise the secondary school English
curriculum in a country, the end users include :
a. Curriculum
officiers in the ministry of education, who may wish to use the information to
evaluate the adequacy of exixting syllabus, curriculum, and materials
b. Teachers
who will teach from the new curriculum
c. Learner,
who will be taught from the curriculum
d. Writers,
who are preparing new textbooks
e. Testing
personnel, who are involved in developing end-of-school assessment
f. Staff
of tertiary institution, who are interested in knowing what the expected level
will be student exiting the schools and what problemls they face
In
any situation where needs analysis is being undertaken, there are thus
different stakeholders, that is those who have a particular interest or
involvement in the issues or programs that are being examined, and it us
important to try to get a sense of what their different agendas are.
Connelly
and Clandinin (198, 131-132) suggest that when a group of persons are working
on a curriculum committee or trying to solve a curriculum problem they should
think of the planning process as a curriculum stakeholder situation and ask the
following question :
1. What
is the purpose of the curriculum situation ?
2. Of
there is a group, what is the makeup of the group ?
3. Who
set up the project ?
4. How
were the group’s membership and purpose established ?
C.
The
target population
The target population in a needs analysis refers to
the people about whom information will be collected. Typically, in languge
programs these will be language learners or potential language learners, but
others are also often involved depending on whether they can provide
information useful in meeting the purposes of the needs analysis. For example,
in conducting a needs analysis to determine the focus of an English program in
public secondary schools in an EFL context, the target population might include
: policy makers, ministry of education officials, teachers, students,
academics, employers ,and etc.
D.
Administering
the needs analysis
Planning a needs analysis involves deciding who will
administer the needs analysis and collect and analyze the result. Needs
analyses vary in their scope and demands, from a survey of a whole school
population in a country to a study of a group of thirty learners in a single
institution. For example, in a need analysis of the language needs od non
English background students studying at a New Zealand university , the
following were involved :
a. The
research team made up of two academics and a reasearh assistant
b. Colleagues
in different departments who discussed the project and viewed sample
questionnaires
c. Students
who piloted the questionnaire
d. Academic
staff of the university who administered some of the questionnaires
e. Secretarial
support involved in preparing questionnaires and tabulating data
E.
Procedures
for conducting needs analysis
A
variety of procedures can be used in conducting needs analysis and the kind of
information abtained is often dependent on the type of procedure selected.
Procedures for collecting information during a needs analysis can be selected
from among the following;
a. Questionnaires,
are either based on a set of structured items or unstructured. Structured items
are much easier to analyze and are hence normally preferred. A disadvantage of
questionnaires, however is that information obtained may be fairly superficial
or imprecise and will often need follow-up gain a fuller understanding of what
respondents intent
b. Self-rating,
these consist of scales that student or others use to rate their knowledgr or
abilities
c. Interview,
may often be useful at the preliminary stage of designing a questionnaire,
since it will help the designer get a sense of what topics and issues can be
focused on in the questionnaire
d. Meetings, a meetings allows a large amount of
information to be collected in fairly short time
e. Observation,
observation of learners behavior in a target situation is another ways of
assessing their needs.
References
Richards, Jack 2001.
Curriculum Development in Language Teaching, Cambridge : Camridge
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