FOCUSING THE ESP

NEEDS ANALYSIS
THE SPECIFICITY OF THE NEEDS
ANALYSIS

 Vary in terms
 Scale
 Scope

 Scale of the NA has to do with how

broadly it is targeted
 Scope of the NA has to do with what
you will teach and how specifically or
narrowly you will focus that content.
SCALE OF THE NA
Nas can range a good deal in
scale from very broad to very
narrow.
Nas can be conducted to include
students internationally, nationally
This range in scale from
international to individual student
represents a wide span indeed.
SCOPE OF THE NA
 Hadto do with the purpose and
content of the ultimate course or
program as well as the degree of the
specificity with which you will need to
present that content in order to
adequately serve the student’s
purposes.
HOW SPECIFIC SHOULD THE SCALE AND
SCOPE BE?

 Dovey(2006) said the following about

specificity:
 Central to the idea of specificity is the notion
that literacies are situated within
sociocultural contexts and have socially
defined purposes. It is implied that a
relatively homogeneous purpose can be
identified for any context, and that the
genres by which this purpose is achieved
can be identified and taught.
CONSTRAINTS ON ESP NA
 Number of forces within any institution may
tend to delimit what can be accomplished.
 Such factors may serve as constraints on
what can be accomplished in an NA so they
should at least be considered early in the
NA process.
 Such constraints seem to naturally fall into
three categories: situational, stakeholder, or
theoretical constraints
SITUATIONAL CONSTRAINTS
 May arise in an NA because of issues
in the general society in which the
institution is situated, because of
politics and policies in the entire chain
of command above that institution,
because of restrictions on funding and
resources, or because of issues within
the curriculum of the institution itself.
SOCIETY CONSTRAINTS
The society in which an NA is
being conducted can impose very
real constraints on what can be
accomplished, and this differs
from society to society.
POLITICS/POLICY CONSTRAINTS

 Related to society but also distinct in the

area of politics and policy, which can
impinge greatly on what can be
accomplished in an NA. Such political and
policy concerns may be national or even
international, provincial, or local.
 May come from the way the ESP program is
organized or how it is related to other ESL
or EFL programs.
RESOURCE CONSTRAINTS
 One of the most tangible results of the
impact of societal or political/policy
constraints will be resource constraints
from lack or withdrawal of funding.
 This may be a general trend for
education in the country or state, or
generally for an entire school, or be a
particular problem for the ESP
program involved.
CURRICULUM CONSTRAINTS
A combination of some or all of the above
may have their greatest impact in terms of
policies, decisions, and rules
 These may have to do with the duration of
courses in terms of the number of
weeks/months available for instruction.
 Other constraints may arise from the
intensity of instruction
STAKEHOLDER CONSTRAINTS
 Much will depend in any NA on the
characteristics or the people involved
 Each NA will involve different groups of
stakeholders, for example, students,
teachers, administrators, teaching
assistants, parents, future professors in
content area courses, future employers, and
politicians
STUDENTS

 Not only the largest stakeholder group in

most settings, but also the group that might
be called the customers of our language
teaching institutions, or at least the targets
of our Nas.
 They can vary like in gender, language
backgrounds, nationalities, and ages.
Teachers
Can vary in a number of interesting ways that
can affect any NA.
 Teachers may vary in terms of their
professional backgrounds with regard to
professional training as ESL or EFL
teachers, professional qualifications,
professional development, expertise in
different aspects of the second language
teaching field, and others.
Administrators
They are the program director, the assistant
director, program coordinators, or other such
people.
 They can vary in terms of competence,
leadership roles, attitudes toward clerical
employees, instructors, and students, as
well as in willingness to change.
Other stakeholder groups
Like teaching assistants, parents, future
professors in content area courses, future
employers, politicians, or any other pertinent
group.
These group can vary in importance
depending on the context
THEORETICAL CONSTRAINTS
 Refers to the approaches that is, sets of
beliefs about language and language
learning and syllabuses that is, sets of
principles used to organize the
teaching/learning process
Approaches
Constraints may arise when the language
teaching and learning approaches that
various stakeholders believe in differ.
BROWN (1995, P.5)
 Defined approaches more from a teacher’s
perspective as “ways of defining what and
how the students need to learn”
 Listed five approaches:

Classical approach
Grammar-translation approach
Direct approach
Audiolingual approach
Communicative approach
SYLLABUSES
 Constraints may also arise in the area of
syllabuses that various stakeholders believe
in.
 Based on McKay (1978), Brown (1995)
discussed syllabuses not as types but as a
specific “ways of organizing the course and
materials” and listed the seven specific
syllabuses
 Structural notional
 Situational skills-based
 Topical task-based
 Functional
 Based on reading in the English as an
international language literature, Brown
(2012a) extended that list of seven
syllabuses to include five additional
syllabuses:
 Lexical

 Pragmatic

 Genre-based

 Discourse-based

 Communicative strategies
THE TWELVE SYLLABUSES
 Structural – would be organized around the
grammatical structures of the language
 Situational – the organization could be
based on geography where situations occur
on campus or on some sense of when they
occur in the semester or day.
 Topical – organized into logical hierarchies,
perhaps with macro-topics and micro-topics.
 Functional – organized around things we do
with the language.
 Notional – based on abstract concepts,
called notions, like linear measurement,
volume, weight, density, and shape.
 Skills-based – based on skills that can be
learned in class and further developed even
after the course is finished
 Task-based – organized around duties,
responsibilities, errands, chores, and so
forth that are typically a necessary part of
using a particular ESP.
 Lexical – organized round semantic categories and
or in terms of frequencies.
 Pragmatic – organized around particular speech act
categories in which we know pragmatics play a key
role.
 Genre-based – organized around relatively broad
categories that define the purpose of
communication.
 Discourse-based – involves having students do
discourse analysis; organized around spoken or
written texts
 Communicative strategies – based on strategies for
coping with mistakes, errors, difficulties, and
breakdowns in communication
THE IMPORTANCE OF SYLLABUSES TO NA
 Any NA should end with suggestions for
what should be taught in the course
 Those suggestions will likely take the form
of a set of tentative objectives or student’s
learning outcomes (SLOs).
 The fact that the people doing an NA, the
needs analysts, would be well advised to
recognize early on what syllabuses they
want to use for two reasons
 First, needs analysts tend to find that
students need to learn language points that
fit into the syllabuses they believe in.
 Second, if the needs analysts do not agree
among themselves what syllabuses they
eventually want the curriculum to follow,
many disagreements and delays may result
 If the syllabuses that an NA suggests are
not acceptable to key stakeholder groups,
those syllabuses will either need to be
modified so that the stakeholders can buy
into them.