Rabu, 20 Maret 2013
Needs analysis
One of the basis assumptions of curriculum development is that a sound
educational program should be based on an analysis of learners’ needs.
Procedures used to collect information about learners’ needs are known as needs
analysis (emerged in 1960s).
1. purposes of needs analysis
a. to find out what language skills a learner needs
in order to perform a particular role, such as sales manager, tour guide, or
university students.
b. To help determine if existing courses adequately
addressed the needs of potential students
c. To determine which students from a group are most
in need of training particular language skills
d. To identify a gap between what students are able
to do and what they need to be able to
do
e. To collect information about a particular problem
leaners are expecting.
K-12
- To determine their communicative abilities in
English
- To determine their formal knolwledge of
english
- To find out how students use language on a
daily basis
- To determine what English language skills are
necessary to enable students to participate in all school and comunity
activities in English
- To find out what prior experinces students
have had with formal education
- Etc.
For example:
When a needs analysis of restaurant employees is conducted, the purposes
might be:
- To determine current levels of language
proficiency of employees
- To determine how many employees are in need
of the language training
- To identify senior restairant staff’s
perception of language problem employees have on the job
- To ascertain the types of transaction
employees typically perform in English.
Needs analysis may take place prior to, during, or after a language
program.
2. The users of needs analysis
A needs analysis may be conducted for a variety of
different users. For example, in conducting a needs analysis to help revise the
secondary school English curricuum in a country, the end users include:
- curriculum
officers in ministry of education, who may wish to use the information to
evalute the adequacy of exixting syllabus, curriculum, and materials
- teachers who
will teach from the new curriculum
- learners who
will be taught from the curriculum
- writers, who
are preparing new textbooks
- testing
personnel, who are involved in developing end-of-school assesments
- staff of
tertiary institution, who are interested in knowing what the expected
level will be of students exixiting the schools and what problem they
face.
3. The target population
The target population in a needs analysis refers
to the people about whom information will be collected. Typically, in language
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. The other target population might
include:
- policy makers
- ministry of
education officials
- teachers
- employers
- parents
- vocational
training specialists
4. Administering The needs analysis
Planning a needs analysis involves deciding who
will adminster the needs analysis and
collect and analyzed the result. In language program, informal needs analysis
is part of a teacher’s ongoing responsibilites.
- The research
team ( academics and research assistant)
- Students who
piloted the questionnaire
- Academic staff
who adminiter some of the questionnaire.
- Secretarial
suport to prepare questionnaire and tabulating data.
Informal needs assessment deals with the informal
negotiations that take place between class teachers and students in the form of
chats with either individual students, group of students, or the whole class in
order to select a focus for the class and create group cohesion by establishing
a coincidence of learning needs. ....
Informal needs assessment is normally the main task of the classroom
teacher during week one of the course....It is a necessary component of
information retrieval on students’ learning needs and should be recorded. It
can subsequently be used as an input for
aims and objectives setting and for
devising course outlines. (Shaw and Dowsett 1986, 47-49)
5. Procedures for conducting needs analysis
A variety of precedures can be used in condcuting
needs analysis and the kind of information obtained is often dependent on the
type of procedure selected. Since any one source of infromation is likely to be
incomplete or partial, a triangular
approach (i.e. collecting information from two or more sources) is advisable.
For example, when a needs analysis of the writing problems encountered by
foreign students enrolled in American universities is conducted, information
could be obtained from the following sources:
·
Samples of
students writing
·
Test data on
students performance
·
Reports by
teachers on typical problems students face
·
Opinon of
experts
·
Information
from students via interviews and questioneres
·
Analysis of
textbook eaching academic writing
·
Etc.
Here are the procedures:
- Questionnaire
Questionnaires are one of the most common
instruments used. They are relatively easy to prepare. They can be used with
large numbers of subjects, and they obtain information that is relatively easy
to tabulate and analyze. They can also be used to elicit information about many
different kinds of issues such as language use, communication difficulties,
preferred learning style, preferred classroom activities, and attitudes and
beliefs.
Questionairres are either based on a set of
structured items (in which the respondents chooses from a limited number of
responses) or unstructured (in which open-ended questions are given that the
respondent can answer as he or she chooses).
Structured items are much easier to analyze and are hence normally
preferred.
- Self-rating
These consists of scales that students or others
use to rate their knowledge or abilities. (self-rating might also be included
as part of a questuonair.) for example, a student might rate how well he or she
can hadle a job interview in English. The disadvantage of such an instrument is
that it provides in impressionistic information and information that is not
very precise.
- Interviews
Interviews allow for a more in-depth exploration
of issues than is possible with a questionaire, though they take longer to
administer and are only feasible for smaller group. An interview may often be
useful at the preliminary stage of designing a questionaire, since it will help
the designer get a sense of what topics and issues can be focused on in the the
questionaire. A structured interview in which a set series of questions is used
allows more consistency accross responses to be obtained. Interviews can be
conducted face-to-face or over the telephone.
- Meetings
A meeting allows a large amount of information to
be collected in a fairly short time. For example, a meeting of teachers on the
topic “students’ problem with listening comprehension” might generate a wide
range of ides. However, information obtained in this way may be impressionistic
and subjective and reflect the ideas of more outspoken members of a group.
- Observation
Observations of learners’ behaviour in a target
situation is another way of assessing their needs. For example, observing
clerks performing their jobs in a bank will enable the observer to arrive at
certain conclusion about their language needs.
However, people often do not perform well when
they are being observed, so this has to be taken into account. In addition,
observation is a specialized skill. Knowing how to observe, what to look for,
and how to make use of the informaton obtained generally requires specialized
training.
- Collecting
learner language samples
Collecting data on how well learners perform on
different language tasks (e.g., business letters, interviews, telephone calls)
and docuenting the typeical problems they have is a useful and direct source of
information about learners’ language needs. Language samples may be collected
through the following means:
·
Written or
oral tasks: examples of students written or oral work are collected
·
Simulations
or role plays: students are given simulation to carry out and their performance
is observed or recorded.
·
Achievement
tests: students are tested for their abilities in different domains of language
use.
·
Performance
test: students are tested on job-related or task-related behavior, such as “how
well a job interview can be carried out in English.”
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