I'm currently doing the Trinity College TESOL Diploma course, and I've been working on a chapter on needs analysis and motivation. I#ve done some basic analysis of students needs before, but most of the time in the setting I teach (university, training future state school teachers of EFL), the needs are roughly the same, and it would be hard to make too much distinction between students anyway.
As far as I can see, the idea of a thorough needs analysis seems to be quite idealistic - especially in the environment I work in! Maybe some of you can help explain; what types of teaching/learning situation is a needs analysis most relevant to? How such an analysis can be made and actually usefully applied in a non-specialist school? For example, even if I find out that the learners will need a grasp of English to function in their careers or occupations and that these are known, I can't really put this into practise unless I have a homogenous group - can I??
Thanks for the discussions and help!! CMF
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In public speaking, we always stress on the importance of audience analysis even before you start preparing your speech. I have seen experienced speakers doing away with this exercise which ultimately ends up in the form of a disgusted audience and the speakers reputation taking a beating.
You have a valid point when you say you find the needs of participants to be more or less the same in an university setting. Obviously the gap in knowledge would be negligible. When you look at this issue from a broader perspective you find learners of the English Language coming from different socio economic and cultural backgrounds.
A persons upbringing and the first few years shape the personality of any individual. When we take a crowd where the age group varies, the educational backgrounds differ and the objective of the person with respect to the English Language is analyzed, you get an accurate picture on how the grouping of the batch needs to be done and the training methodology to be adopted to train each group.
Coming to your point of having a homogenous group, it can be implemented only after you have done the profiling of the batch. You could have numerous batches and the crowd is bound to vary across batches, but this the crux of any training program.