Do we really need needs analysis?

Teachers are often urged to conduct a needs analysis at the start of their course. But if your analysis is just choosing a coursebook, don’t feel guilty. The reality of most teachers’ contexts and the students they have is that a formal needs analysis often won’t produce anything you don’t know already or lead to changes you can implement. What is more fundamental is ensuring that you give plenty of space for students to talk in genuine ways about themselves as an ongoing process where you can support them and make use of this information in a variety of smaller ways than changing the whole syllabus or spending a lot of time creating new lessons.

Needs analysis and grammar – what’s the point?

Of course, as with other areas of teaching, when people discuss needs analysis, what they mean can vary and often depends on their view of language and learning. Early on in my career, the needs analysis I encountered seemed to come down to a 5o-point grammar test to determine what structures students needed to work on. The grammar was almost certainly decided by the same grammar syllabuses that we see in coursebooks and it was probably what determined how students were placed in a particular level, so it didn’t really offer any great insight.

Needs analysis and outcomes: tasks and interests

On the other hand, we have a ‘task-based’ needs analysis which focuses on what students want to do with their language. I am obviously more inclined to this way of thinking, but in many contexts the students either have no obvious needs, don’t really know what they need, or may be somewhat misleading in their responses (as we’ll see). We might replace an analysis of “needs” with interests, but here again much the same thing applies. Students may say they like something but actually don’t talk about it much (say tennis or stamp collecting); they may have very broad interests, say reading, but when we share a story it turns out the don’t read fiction. Most of the time, the responses are entirely predictable – the same things we all typically talk about: what we did at the weekend, work, food, weather, etc. Students may also say they don’t like something – politics – but then when presented with a political topic like housing, we discover they have a lot to say and are passionate about it. There is also level to be considered here. According to the CEFR, part of what makes C level speakers proficient is that they can competently engage with topics OUTSIDE of their immediate field of work and interests. That suggests that addressing the needs of a Proficiency class should really lead to a course focused on things they are NOT interested in or never do! I’m not recommending this as the whole of the syllabus, but it is what has to happens at times.

However, the limitations of the needs analysis and outcomes go further than this in that even in small classes, it will be difficult to produce classes that address everyone’s individual needs and wants. It is reasonable to fall back on the broad predictable topics of conversation and practical activities that a good coursebook focused on outcomes will cover anyway.

One-to-one and needs analysis

Obviously if you are teaching one-to-one we can align the students needs and interests more completely with what we do. For example early on in my career I taught and academic in medicine who attended a lot of conferences. We spent most of the time focused on working on her papers (occasionally correcting) and in particular on delivering these (reading them out). We worked on individual sounds, chunking the texts and something on pace and intonation. But I have also had many one-to-ones where the student had no particular goal or rarely expressed any interest. Most weeks our two-hour class would start with “What did you get up to this week? Anything happen?” “Nothing especial”.  

Does needs analysis turn us into worker units

It also seems to me (if you don’t mind me being a little political here), that task-based needs analysis also has the danger of conceiving the world as too practical: the only useful English class is one that makes us better workers. But humans – as I discussed in my last post – are fundamentally social, and most of our interactions are not exactly goal driven. So even in the case where, yes, your one-to-one student has a goal, you might want to give space to ‘chat’ and let the student lead you to other areas that they want to talk about – and may need help with language-wise.

Talking and listening to students is needs analysis

And this is what I want to emphasise, paying attention to students wants and needs IS a good thing, but it can be happen in many ways outside of a formal needs analysis and many, many teachers are probably doing it already. For example, here’s a list of things I do:

• Getting to know you activities at the start of a course
• Do tasks based on what I and (I know from experience) students talk about outside class.
• Ask a variety of questions based on a reading or listening – not just “the topic”.
• Ask questions about how vocabulary is used.
• Get students to say true things about themselves and their opinions when practising particular bits of vocabulary and grammar.
• including discussions on how students learn or reflection on what they have learned
• Use a coursebook or other materials that have these kinds of activities.
• Allow students to get side-tracked within a task
• Chat to students in the break,  as they come in / leave or on social activities.
• Regularly ask students (or discuss in pirs) if they would like to do any more on a topic or move on.
• Do open homework journals where students write about whatever they want.
• Have a WhatsApp group with low levels asking students to ask and answers simple questions about themselves.
• Give students a number of different texts loosely based on a topic and ask them to read the one that interests them (and then share what they read with other students).

There may well be others – I’d be happy to hear your suggestions.

What do you do with the needs analysis? More grammar?

Whether you take a more formal approach or are just giving space to students to express themselves in class, what do we do with this information? If a student says they want to be corrected all the time or they need more grammar? Here’s where your beliefs about language and learning can come in once more. Some teachers may notice errors in students’ speech and see this as a sign that we should get out the grammar book and hammer out the mistakes with numerous exercises. Or they might skip the topic which students are ‘uninterested in’ but replace this with a lesson on the grammar in that unit.

Or more talking and listening

A more outcomes/task-based approach might be to just draw attention to errors or ’emergent language’ that we notice in students speaking and then just move on to do more talking and listening. We could sometimes choose to skip topics that aren’t relevant to our students or they say they don’t want to do and just move on to the next unit. We don’t have to replace any grammar input that we ‘missed out’, because we can trust that it will come up when students do another task or chat. It will come up either as something the students try to say and get wrong or which they simply avoided because they didn’t know it. At the point you could correct/teach the form, and potentially, if you really want to set the exercise you missed as a little practice. Or not!

Or perhaps we notice during a task or feedback that students got side-tracked on to a different topic. We might set that as a subject for our next discussion with a few spontaneously written questions for the whole class. Or we might think of ways to incorporate these discussions and interests in future lessons. For example, we can:

• exemplify new language by connecting it to what you have learnt about students
• tweak or add to the questions in the coursebook based on previous side-tracks
• potentially write a whole lesson around the student-generated topic (depending on your time and how much you get paid!)

We discuss the issues of lesson planning and addressing students needs on an ongoing basis in our course Plan smarter and get the most from your coursebook,

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