One of the more ridiculous notions instilled in me on my month-long CELTA course taken twenty years ago was the idea that via a scribbled sheet of paper containing a few topics and some grammar structures I might somehow be able to discern the ‘needs’ of my subsequent classes. In retrospect, it now seems almost as mad to me as a novice medical student with a few weeks’ study under their belt asking a patient what THEY think the root of their medical condition is – and then treating them in accordance with this self-diagnosis. I dread to think what would’ve happened to me when I first slipped a disc in my early 20s after a particularly heavy session in the gym and yet only became aware of the issue due to a throbbing pain behind my knee (which I now realise was the result of inflammation of the sciatic nerve, the root of which had been trapped beneath the lapsed spinal disc). Might I have been given knee strengthening exercises to do? Told to run more? God only knows, but one thing you can be sure of is that I would not have been well diagnosed and that the treatment I would’ve received would almost certainly have done more harm than good.
It’s not just my CELTA course that tried to foist Needs Analysis onto me, though. The edition of Jeremy Harmer’s THE PRACTICE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING that I read as part of the course also includes a section on the subject, albeit within the context of evaluating material that might be useful / relevant to students. We’re told to ‘describe’ our students by noting down their age, sex, social / cultural backgrounds, occupations, motivation/attitude, educational background, English level, world knowledge, and their interests and beliefs – and to then use these findings to draw conclusions about what material might best work. We’re then encouraged to get students to write the contexts and situations students will probably use English in at some future date, the order of priority for use of different language skills – and the percentage of classroom time that should be spent on each skill. Once you’ve collated all this information, you presumably do the maths – add up all the different percentages from all the different students in the class, divide by whatever number you have in the class and then divvy up your week’s plan accordingly!
Having spent at least the first few years of my teaching career engaging in this kind of deranged activity, I can officially report one thing with certainty: most students want to do more grammar! Even the really good ones who hardly ever make grammar mistakes still think they need to do more grammar. The endless study of structures – their forms and their meanings / uses – is still very widely seen as the yardstick by which students measure their own sense of progress. In addition to this, I can confirm that most students – and here I’m talking particularly about GENERAL ENGLISH students – have either very little idea of when and where they might end up needing to use their English, if indeed they ever will; or else simply know they’ll need to use it in their lives and that this could include any manner of contexts and conversations. As if this wasn’t already complex and confusing enough, there’s the fact that needs and wants may often be two very different beasts. A student may only NEED English in a very limited context – to read academic papers connected to dentistry, say – but their WANTS may include reading 19th century literature, chatting to foreigners they meet in the bar near where they live in Alicante, surfing websites connected to the Moorish influence on Spanish culture and understanding recipes in English! Take the overlapping, conflicting complexity of one individual and multiply it fifteen times and you have a normal class: one that it’s nigh-on impossible to assess or analyse the ‘needs’ of using any of these approaches!
Of course, if you’re teaching one-to-one or doing a very niche ESP or Business class, then maybe this approach works better. I still recall being sent out to teach in a factory in Tanggerang – in the sprawling industrial suburbs of Jakarta – armed with my CEC English Course, which we slogged through for a few weeks before my students plucked up enough courage to tell me that really this wasn’t what they needed and that actually the only reason they needed English was to understand the vast Suzuki manual they had to plough through in order to do their jobs properly!
Knowing this in advance would have saved us all time and stress, no doubt. Interestingly, in the edition of Jim Scrivener’s LEARNING TEACHING that I read as a novice, Needs Analysis is ONLY mentioned within the confines of a discussion about teaching Business English, which does make sense.
More recently, the concept of meeting students’ needs has formed a central part of the discourse around Dogme, as though simply doing enough talking with our students and plugging the gaps that emerge is somehow sufficient provision of language for all subsequent needs (as opposed to simply being an immediate finger-in-dyke-wall type operation)! The talking around any given task is in itself apparently the analysis and the recasting or reformulation of output, the meeting of the needs thus exposed!
Whilst there’s obviously much to be said for working from what students say and helping them to say it better, the claim that this meets needs seems to me only marginally less spurious than the idea that asking students which topics they wish to whizz through during their four-week stay at a private language school that has continuous enrollment – and which structures they most want to go over yet again in order to increase ever further their anxiety about them – helps us do the same.
My own teaching – and hopefully also my students’ learning – benefited greatly from abandoning questionnaires of the kind outlined above (and of the kind still to be found all over the web as well!) – and finally recognising that one of the things students pay for is a more expert analysis of what they need to do in order to get to where they might want to get to – which, let’s face it, often just means to the next level up! As previously mentioned, students themselves, as a result of their own learning experiences and notions about language, tend to see progress very much in terms of grammar. I can count on maybe one hand the number of students I’ve met over the years who, in tutorials or just whilst chatting, have been astute enough to recognise that the main thing stopping them from moving up past Intermediate, say, is their lack of lexis! It’s a rare learner indeed who perceives that it’s only the drudgery of taking on board another one or two or three thousand collocations, chunks, expressions, words is at the heart of what will push them on to FCE and beyond! And that’s where we come in!
Because REALLY what your General English students need MOST is this:
– repeated exposure to as many of the most frequent words in the language, the two- and three-star words in Learner Dictionaries, as can be managed in the time you have with them.
– greater understanding of how these words work with other words, and how they work with grammar.
– advice on how best to shoulder the huge burden of having to learn this much language
– to put this advice into practice and to take some responsibility for this learning at home, whether it be by reading graded readers, making revision cards, doing vocabulary self-study books or whatever
– to read and to listen to appropriately graded texts across a wide range of social, academic and work-related topics
– to have space to discuss their own responses to these texts – and to tell stories / anecdotes using the lexis studied – in class . . . AND then to have the teacher help them say these things better
– to become more aware (via repeated work on this) of how language sounds when spoken: the linking, the elision, the assimilation, the weak forms, and so on . . . and to get the chance to hear a broad range of accents, both native and non-native.
– to sometimes be corrected when they do make mistakes with language (including grammar) previously taught and to be made aware of why what they said / wrote was wrong
– to spend some time either consolidating or extending what they know about how structural grammar works, but less time than they spend on lexis, as lexis is far more at the root of communicative competence than structural grammar is
– to have a teacher confident enough to explain these needs to them, to explain why what they think they need may not actually be what’s best for them, and to guide them towards ways of more fruitfully using the little time they have available for the study of English in more fruitful ways
And THAT is never going to happen if we continue to send inexperienced teachers out there into the big wide world armed with photocopied lists of unit titles and topic headings from Murphy’s English Grammar In Use, is it?!
hughdellar 
[…] One of the more ridiculous notions instilled in me on my month-long CELTA course taken twenty years ago was the idea that via a scribbled sheet of paper containing a few topics and some grammar str… […]
Hello Hugh
i agree with you 100%. I am not CELTA trained but I have worked with many CELTA-trained teachers and for private language schools that go to work sites to offer courses and offer CELTA courses galore.. I teach in the public system where we must have a graduate degree in education. Could you imagine a teacher going into a classroom in a public school and asking students what their needs were? Could you imagine a university professor coming to a lecture and asking students what their needs were?
I used to work for the largest private language school inSwitzerland. They always asked us to have students fill these things out. The adminstrators had no training in education or educational administration and did not seem to understand that the learners would have no clue about what they wanted or needed. How would they? The learners we were sent to teach had no experience of using English in a work-related manner and virtually no experience with English-speaking people.
For instance, we were contracted to provide English language training at two state nursing colleges. We were told to have students fill out these forms. The students had hardly even done any work in a Swiss hospital let alone worked with English-speaking patients. However, by simply asking students about their work, we were able to see that some worked in maternity and other in geriatrics. One student in maternity said she would like to be able to explain, in English, how a mother should care for and bathe her newly-born child. That was a beautiful moment.
Was I now expected to provide this to every student in that that class? What about the students who had no idea about what they needd? How about the majority who suffered through English class because it was a requirement handed down by the state!
Needs Analysis does have a valid place. They should be done by the school adminstration who has made a decision to have an outside provider come and do training. It has no place in the classroom with each student—big difference. The language school (who usually has no one who even knows what curriculum design is) should do a Needs Analysis with the administrators of the nursing school (in this case) and together decide what will be offered to the students. Basic training in Management Theory will also tell you that the whole organization has to buy into the plam if the employees (students) are to take it on board.
I think that if teachers had some foundation in pedagogy and management theory and educational adminsitration they would see how foolish this automatic handing out of these forms is.
Thank you for being bold enough to say this and I hope private language schools will read your post and know why they do these things.ö
Hi there –
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to read the post and to put your own thoughts into words here.
I thought your analogy with public schools and universities was particularly pertinent!
It highlighted the lunacy of the CELTA Needs Analysis approach very very clearly.
It occurred to me reading your post that perhaps what’s happened, consciously or otherwise, is that CELTA courses have somehow tried to compensate for the highly UNprofessional end products they produce – and I very much include the earlier version of myself in this, by the way! – by insisting on this veneer of pseudo-professionalism to paper over the cracks as it were.
When you move away from General English and into more ESP / Vocational English areas, then of course there’s a place for taking time before starting a course to work out what folk need to do – or might need to be able to do at some point – in English . . . and to always be conscious of the difference between DOPING your job in English and TALKING ABOUT your job in English (a subtle but extremely significant difference that it took me quite some time to work out for myself!). Ultimately, though, as you say, a professional still has to make a judgement call as to what’s most useful to focus on with everyone you’re supposed to be teaching in the time you have.
In terms of the nurses, for instance, it doesn’t do any harm to draw up a list of possible contexts of usage: explaining how to care for and bathe new born babies, putting patients at ease, describing respiration, etc – and discussing the list in advance with the group of nurses themselves or with their immediate line managers to help whittle down the focus. If you get profoundly mixed messages back, though, it’s still your shout! Or, far better – and I totally agree with you – the institution’s and the management’s shout, so that the classroom practitioners is clear from the off where they stand and what’s the target.
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I found the article confusing. You begin by saying that there is no need for a Needs Analysis and yet you end by proposing a list of what your students need, i.e. you have conducted a Needs Analysis.
The concept of Needs Analysis is valid. The way in which they are carried out is perhaps open to more discussion. A good Needs Analysis will tell you precisely what your students are after and combined with your knowledge as a teacher it will lay the foundations for a good course. A bad Needs Analysis on the other hand is a waste of time all round.
This is our take on things: http://tinyurl.com/bqnj23t
Hi there –
Thanks for reading and for taking the time to comment.
Apologies if my point was unclear – blame it on having to write in between a teaching job and dealing with two small kids!
Anyway, what I was trying to say was that the list at the end of what i think students need is something that students themselves will never be able to tell you, no matter what kind of needs analysis you do with them!
In that sense, the closing list really isn’t the result of conducting any kind of analysis.
Rather, it’s cumulative knowledge built up over the years of what it is that helps students get better than they are – and my point was really that as teachers we should know these things, and have the strength of our own convictions when it comes to telling them this is what we think they need to improve, even if it’s at odds with what THEY may feel they need (which, more often than not, is simply some vague notion of ‘more grammar’!)
I also want to say that I have come to believe that asking students things like why they’re learning English, and how they will use their English in the future is basically an epic waste of time because (a) most students don’t know, or have such a vast range of possible contexts / needs that they’re impossible to list or verbalise and (b) even if all students in the class ARE somehow able to articulate every possible context in which they may one day need to use English, working out what to then do with this overlapping, conflicting, contradictory mess of information from a range of different students is nigh-on impossible! It certainly won’t enable anyone to tailor classes lesson by lesson in such a way that their students’ ‘needs’ are all met. Finally, as I said above, most students simply don’t know what they need to get better and far too often tend to phrase this in terms of simply wanting to do more grammar! You’ll never meet a student who tells you that they struggle with complex noun phrases, need more work on the genre conventions of academic writing about representation in graphic design and may need to be able to discuss a wide slew of small talk topics once they start their future career as an art director in a video company, for instance. In almost all circumstances, such self-knowledge is denied students!
I have been teaching Business English for about 30 years, in-company, groups, one-to-one, and now at a University, including both pre-and in-service students.
As I ran my own business I considered it part of the service to offer a serious Needs Analysis before setting up groups and putting together a curriculum and programme, and especially for the in-company courses this approach certainly won me a lot of customers.
But in my heart of hearts I always knew it was kind of a scam. It was very seldom that employees had any insight into what they really needed, and the gap between needs and wishes was often so wide that years of lessons could never have begun to fill it.
As for pre-service learners, let’s not even go there. My experience is that they will always ask for grammar, as Hugh mentions. They also love word lists, but rarely can see beyond the traditional word-for-word translation schema.
Where I have been able to overcome this problem was the occasional high-level manager who needed to hone his or her presentation or negotiation skills. In those rare cases we could get to grips with concrete situations and make real progress.
Otherwise, I have veered away from wishy-washy learner-centered ideas and imposed measures that would probably make some CELTA tutors blanch. I’m not always successful in making converts, but never say die.
This is a really interesting post, Cindy. I’ve had similar experiences with in-company courses, big discrepancies between what students (or bosses) want and what can possibly be achieved in the time we have. I also find it very hard to convince the responsible HR people of my approach to learning English, which aims at helping students really acuquire the language rather than rote learning fixed expressions – and studying more grammar. So I’d be really interested in hearing what kind of measures you have imposed!
Antje, thanks for your reply. I don’t have any magic solutions, unfortunately! One approach that I found helpful was, rather than doing Needs Analysis, to gather information from all the stakeholders (HR, students, students’ managers) about expectations. In other words, what does HR expect in terms of ROI, what do students expect to be able to do better after the course, what do managers expect their subordinates to be better at, and so on. You need to do this as specifically as possible. For example, if they all say that the students need to get better at attending meetings, that’s too vague. What kind of meetings, who is there, how often do they take place, are they face-to-face or virtual, and so on. Armed with this data, you need to hammer out an agreement, in writing, which all the stakeholders have to commit to. I’ve found it’s better to focus on one or two areas at a time.
it doesn’t sound much different to NA, but framing it in terms of practical skills will usually appeal to the ones who are paying for the course, and to students as well.
Of course, the main problem with this approach is one that Hugh mentioned in his original blog post: you’ll never have a class where everyone has identical needs. My solution to this was to offer targeted mini-courses for one-to-one or very small groups, set up with a limited time frame (say, 10 lessons), rather than the on-going large groups of mixed needs and mixed levels, which often suffer from poor attendance and high turnover anyway.
Hope this gives you a little to think about!
Interesting stuff, Cindy.
I can see how tailoring a shorter course for Business English students, with very specific outcomes hammered out in advance, and reached particularly with the consent and input of the main stakeholders – i,e; those who pay the piper – would work. Not a hope in hell of such narrow goals ever emerging in a General English class, though, sadly!
Thanks for your insights here too Antje.
Interesting to see other folk within the supposedly easier end of teaching when it comes to needs analysis suffering and struggling similarly.
Hi Cindy –
It’s fascinating – and strangely heartening – though of course not entirely unsurprising to hear someone inside the Business English industry describe the kind of Needs Analysis we’re led to believe add a veneer of professionalism to what we do as little more than “a scam”.
It’s certainly been true from my own (admittedly sporadic) experience of teaching Business English over the years that many students don’t really know what they’ll be doing with their English in the future, or else simply know they’ll need to functional in it across a wide range of topics and contexts. The gap between ambition / expectation and reality / plausibility is another issue far too rarely discussed when it comes to talking about Needs Analysis. What, for instance, is one to do with a group of basically Pre-Int students who’ll tell you they need their English to get 6.5 in their IELTS exams so they can start their Master’s in September? In these situations, which are the norm where I work, the teacher then has to both decide content / approach AND also manage and carry out damage limitation of such sky-high expectations!
I envy you those rare students with very narrow concepts of what they aim to achieve – and salute your common sense principles and forthright teacher-centred exertion of wisdom and experience in the rest of your teaching situations!
Thanks again for writing.
Thanks a lot for all these details, Cindy. My experiences are similar. I have done some of these short course with smaller groups but this always made me feel uneasy as there is not that much you can do in such a short time. The students probably need to do a course because their English is not good enough for their jobs, but then if it still isn’t after school and training and working in the field they are probably not really into languages or have had some really negative experiences that put them off. So what these people need is a change of perspective and attitude, which takes lot of time. Many companies are not willing to invest that much and I find it soooo difficult to explain manager type people in manufacturing what it is that I can do for them, something that would really make a difference.
I’ve been teaching a group in-company for 6 years now (1 hour a week) in general English – with Innovations. I was really lucky that somebody else negotiated that for me, somebody who’s more convincing than me vis a vis people in charge of the money. I don’t know what he told them but I got the class at it’s going great. I’ve had fantastic feedback. Attendance is great and they’ve made impressive progress. We have the occasional newcomer and then it usually takes them about six months or so to “adapt”. Often expectations are like “You tell me what I need to know and then I know it.” But that’s not how language learning works, right. We need to do things with the language, try it out in different ways, form hypotheses, test them, explore, … if we want to use it confidently, without getting stressed in meetings or negotiations. I didn’t realise this at first but when we get a new student the difference in attitude is striking. The way Innovation and Outcomes works is really changing students’ perception, empowering them, helping them become independent users of English even if “they’ve never been good at language”. As a teacher I find this approach extremely rewarding!
Thanks for this Antje.
Another great response.
The first thing it mad me think of is just how unrealistic people’s expectations are, especially once they’ve already acquired SOME language but then want to push on and get to a really good level, a feat which requires serious hard graft and effort and which, as you suggest, many simply aren’t up for! Making clear to students the (sometimes severely) limited nature of what might be possible given the constraints never makes us popular, but it does make us better professionals.
I recently had a guy come in with his wife asking – and I quote – if we could help her pass IELTS YESTERDAY! When I laughed and said I couldn’t promise that, he said – not entirely jokingly – “How about tomorrow?” I then tried to explain that IELTS isn’t a pass or fail exam and to find out what score she’d need – 6.5 – and if she’d ever take the exam before (four times in the last two years, getting 4.5 each and every time!!). On hearing all this, I tried to explain that to go up even 0.5 takes a MINIMUM of 150 hours of serious study, so say a term of full-time classes, assuming the student also revises, does homework, etc. So we were looking at at least a year. he then got very irate, said this wasn’t good enough and that he’d seen other centres offering much better results. I explained he was welcome to discard my advice and try them . . . which he did! I have a horrible feeling his wife will be scoring 4.5 for some time to come.
It’s really great, by the way, for me to read the positive comments about OUTCOMES and INNOVATIONS.
One of our covert and subliminal goals has obviously always been to bring about some kind of change – no matter how small – in the way both teachers and students think about language and about language learning, and to hopefully motivate students by making learning less of a pseudo-intellectual ‘rule-based’ business and more simply a matter of taking on board the best way to say things that help you achieve goals you may actually want to achieve, so it’s great to see that this seems to be working!
You make a very interesting, counter-intuitive argument here, Hugh, and I have a LOT of sympathy for it. I just posted a reply to a blog extolling needs analysis and I said I agreed. But, having read your post, I think it was a knee-jerk reaction and, on reflection, I agree with you that it’s often just a waste of time. Pap like CELTA course leaders often dish out is just too easy, and you’re absolutely right, in my opinion, to question the value of going through the motions. Regular feedback sessions are surely far more effective than any dull needs analysis handed out at the start of a course, and all the points you make about on-going attention to students’ needs are right on! But maybe you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater a bit. Don’t you think that, even in a general English course, some attempt to find out what students think they need (maybe using a general discussion among class members about what they expect from the course) can be useful?
Hi Geoff –
Thanks for taking the time to read and to post your reactions.
Sorry to have rained on your parade there!!
I think where a whole-class discussion CAN be useful is firstly for the teacher early on in the course to explain what they think the students need and how they plan to run things: basically explain the list I ended my post with: say “This is roughly what I think you need. You may disagree, but trust me. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. We’ll all have a lot of fun along the way and hopefully you’ll all leave this class speaking much better English, listening better to spoken English and with a better idea of how language works – and how you can study better at home”
That seems fine to me – or failing that, there may come a point during the course when the teacher feels the need to explain their rationale and approach, especially if it’s to defuse simmering perceptions that there’s not enough grammar!
Apart from that, I’d have said that you’d be wasting a good half-hour asking students what they want / need early on that could actually be put to much better use just teaching them something new and something useful! In my experience, so long as students feel they’re being challenged, they’re learning new stuff, they’re getting corrected, they’re doing some pron work, they’re covering some grammar, they’re being listened to and treated with respect – and that their teacher knows what they’re doing – then they’ll be happy!
As Lord Reith once put it, give the people what they didn’t know they wanted!
I’d like to share my experience with regular, individual feedback. I started it two semesters ago, offering every student – first in one new course, now in that one and one of my older courses, a 15-minute session per semester – immediately after class – for individual feedback, discussion of needs and where he or she wants to go. I had just prepared a few standard questions to get us started (Why did you decide to come, When do you need English outside the course, How do you feel about your progress, What do you find difficult, …). I also had a CEF folder with me, the ones where you can determine in great detail what you can do and what you might want to achieve in the near- and medium-term future but non of them wanted to take a closer look. I think it was information overload. They were very interested in discussing their personal learning situation, though, and I also managed to get in a couple of things on my approach and methods, but basically these sessions served to strengthen the bond between teacher and student, they felt appreciated and taken seriously as individuals. 15 Minutes were hardly ever enough, actually. Sometimes it took us more than an hour.
While in the first semester I talked to almost everybody in the class, in the second only about 50% entered their name on the list. So either it was not very effective at all (i.e. waste of time) or so effective (e.g. in terms of showing appreciation) that they no longer need it. I didn’t dare ask 😉 My motivation to do that was that I felt I wasn’t giving every individual sufficient attention, particularly the quieter ones who then might drop out. I teach in the evening and most people come straight from work and want to get home fairly quickly after class, so there is not much opportunity to chat informally. I also wanted some feedback on my teaching. Unfortunately, my school does not provide any.
So in the last year I had just one student who thought she knew exactly what she wanted (more grammar) and we discussed that. With all the others it was “just” relationship building, but in retrospect I feel it was really worth it. I can make the course more relevant to each student because I know a bit more about their lives so I can give examples of language structures now and then that fit in with their lives or make the occasional reference. So people stay longer in my classes, which makes my school happy, and they like coming, which makes me happy 🙂 I think that this also makes the course more relevant and effective for the individual student, but it has less to do with the language items or structures we cover and much more with the feeling that somebody cares.
Great quote from the awful Lord Reith!
You didn’t rain on my parade – you taught me something very valuable. You argue your case extremely cogently and, to me, it has the ring of truth. I envy your students!
Thank you for the kind words, Geoff.
Really pleased to have struck a chord with you.
Hope you enjoy the rest of the 20 Things in 20 years series as much!
I’ll be doing another one by the end of the week.
This is just exactly what I think 🙂 We’re the professionals, who (should) know what the students need to improve themselves – and the need analysis AT THE BEGINNING doesn’t make sense. What I do with my students, usually after 3 months, is to ask questions like: ‘what whould you like to do more often’ or ‘what would you like to limit’, but, first of all, I need to PROPOSE something to them, because they probably have no idea what collocations, chuck, idioms, weak forms etc. are – just because they were thaught in a grammar-driven way. Thanks for the post!
Glad it struck a chord with you Katarzyna.
At our first lexical Conference, held at University of Westminster last Saturday, Michael Lewis came back out of retirement to do the closing Q&A and reiterated this point.
He’d been talking about how it’s really NOT explanation of meaning or endless reiteration of form that helps students really get to grips with grammar, or with language: rather, it’s the weight of examples upon examples, repeated noticing, and basic comprehensible exposure. One teacher asked “Yes, but some Pre-Int students really want me, for instance, to explain the difference between WILL and GOING TO, so surely I have to give them what they want”.
Michael simply said that if you had something wrong with you and went to the doctor’s, you might pray they’d tell you everything was OK, but if the doctor was aware of the fact that it wasn’t, then they’d be irresponsible to simply tell you what you wanted to hear. In the long run, you’re doing them a favour by telling them what they maybe DON’T want to hear and by insisting that they have to trust you as you know more about how languages work and are learned than they do!
Reblogged this on ENGLISH LANGUAGE REVIEW 4U.
Thanks for the forwarding-on Paul.
Appreciated.
[…] can strengthen the bond between teacher and student. However, I couldn’t agree more with Hugh Dellar’s opinion in his excellent post on teaching General English students ‘sometimes teachers should be confident enough to explain why […]