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Nguyễn Mai Linh Tạp chí KHOA HỌC & CÔNG NGHỆ 112(12)/1: 261 - 266

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A NEEDS ANALYSIS FOR ENGLISH FOR ELECTRONICS

AND COMMUNICATIONS OF UNDERGRADUATES

AT COLLEGE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION

TECHNOLOGY - THAI NGUYEN UNIVERSITY

Nguyen Mai Linh*

College of Information and Communication Technology – TNU

SUMMARY

English has become more and more important, especially in the academic world, where most of

the work is written in English. For that reason, English for Electronics and Communications (EEC)

is offered to engineering students of that major. However, to design an effective ESP (English for

Specific Purpose) course, a needs analysis is required to provide a foundation for what should be

taught and how it should be delivered. This study focused on the language needs of third year

students majoring in Electronics and Communications at Thai Nguyen University of Information

and Communication Technology (ICTU). A questionnaire survey was conducted, which revealed

that most of the students were aware of the importance of the course. A large number of them

intended to develop 4 skills throughout the course. An analysis of written test was also carried out.

The results also showed the students’ weaknesses in the language. The results of the study provide

an insight into the students’ needs and give guidelines to develop of new course book which fit the

students’ needs.

Key words: Needs analysis, curriculum development, syllabus design, ESP, lexical errors.

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND ITS ROLE IN

ESP CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT*

EEC is a requirement for all undergraduate

students majoring in Electronics and

Communications subfields atICTU.

However,EECsyllabus has not fully been

developed, and is not derived from the

students’ particular needs. The problems of

the current syllabus are also reflected in the

students’ results as well as the situation in

classrooms such as students’ low motivation,

numbers of students quitting the class.

Therefore, the current syllabus should be

renewed, in which a needs analysis should be

conducted to identity the students’ language

needs and the potential factors that can affect

the implementation of the new syllabus.

Needs can be understood in many different

ways and have been discussed by a number of

authors. Five common meanings of needs

have been defined [4]. First,needs canrefer to

what learners have to be able to do at the end

*

Email: [email protected]

of the course to fulfill some job requirements.

Second, needs can be what learners are

desirable to do after the course by the

community or society. Third,needs can be the

process learners need to pass through to

acquire language. Fourth, needs refers to what

learners want to have after the course. Finally,

needs are interpreted as lacks, or in particular,

linguistic lacks what learners do not have and

need to have.

Needs analysis is “the process of determining

the needs for which a learner or a group of

learners requires a language and arranging the

needs according to priorities” [3, p. 353]. In

ESP, the main goal of needs analysis is to

identify the language skills and the

proficiency that learners need to perform

some particular tasks in the field [4].

Well-aware of the importance of a needs

analysis in designing a ESP syllabus, many

curriculum specialists have set needs analyses

as the first step of the whole curriculum

development procedure. Different approaches

to needs analysis have been conducted. In

designing an English course of computing, [6]