CURRICULUM AND MATERIAL DESIGN

Needs Analysis

SECOND ASSIGNMENT
Professor: Mauricio Martinez

*Based on the book designing language courses by Kathleen Graves

Goal: Assessing students’ needs in terms of

desires, interests and language level. To do
so, you will design two different
instruments to gather information from
your students. The instruments are a
questionnaire and a diagnostic activity.

MATERIALS:

Reading 1. Chapter six. Designing Language Courses by

Kathleen Graves.
Reading 2. Types of Needs Assessment Tools and Activities

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO IT?

1. Read chapter sixth of our course book Designing Language Courses by Kathleen
Graves (Remember you can find it in a PDF in the virtual platform).

2. Check also the resource Types of Needs Assessment Tools and Activities, which you
can find in our Virtual Room as well. Check the 5 tools presented for collecting
information, and the examples for each one of them.
When you have read these two documents, you will start designing a needs assessment
questionnaire for your students taking the examples presented as a model. This
questionnaire is aimed to get subjective information about the students: interests,
desires, goals, learning styles, etc. Depending on the language level of the students,
you will decide if the questionnaire is designed in English or Spanish.

Bear in mind that you are not assessing students’ level in this case, but students’
subjective information, so students need to understand the questions in order to
provide as much and relevant information as possible.

Be careful when you design this questionnaire: it is natural to include different types of
questions which we think can be of good help. However, there are questions which are
not useful at all but instead can become distractors for students and for our analysis.
The idea is that you evaluate carefully the different questions you will use in terms of
how relevant they are in relation to the context of the students.

Look at this example:

Context: Analysis of the needs of second grade children of a public school

from a rural non tourist-region
Question 1: ¿En dónde y con quién hablaste inglés esta semana?
Question 2: ¿Con qué frecuencia utilizas inglés?
Unless few cases, the answers can be foreseen, so these questions are not relevant to
these students’ context.

To design your questionnaire, use the information

from our resource “Doing Action Research” on
how to work with questionnaires (page 81-89)

Remember that:
“…questionnaires can get you three types of
information: factual or demographic (who the
interviewees are and their
background/experiences); behavioural (what they
do, or did in the past); attitudinal (attitudes,
opinions, beliefs, interests and values)”.
(Burns, 2009)

4. After this, you will design a diagnostic activity to assess students’ level of language.
It must be a class activity which works on writing or speaking skills. The idea is that this
activity can help you get an insight of students’ level.

You will have to ask the teacher for permission to apply that activity. Try to design an
activity which is not too long, so it does not take the whole class time to be done by
students.

To design it, take into account the expected previous knowledge they must have in
terms of class goals. You can use the information you collected at the context definition
stage to design it: students’ expected skills, if students are part of bilingual school, are
going to be different from the ones expected from students at a language institute, for
example.

If it is not possible to apply the activity to all of the students because of the group size,
or group access, or any other relevant reason, you are allowed to apply it to half plus
one of the total number of students in the group.

5. Apply both instruments to the group of students you are working with.
6. Write a report. You have to include:

a) The two instruments used to collect the data: a sample of your questionnaire (one
blank and one answered by a student) and a sample of the diagnostic activity you did
to the students (Scan and add three samples picked-up at random).

b) Write a short description of the implementation of the instruments. How was the
process done? (20 lines)

c) Show your results using some charts by each question (for the questionnaire).
d) Write a brief (not longer than a page) analysis of students’ needs in terms of language
level: grammar, vocabulary, and skills in general (speaking / writing), which you may
have found through the application of the diagnostic activity.

e) Write the conclusions of this exercise. Use the following questions as a guide:

 What is the main necessity of your target population?

 What skills, or language input need to be reinforced or to be considered
as a priority inside the curriculum?
 What is the best methodology that could be implemented to overcome the
need identified (take into account also your students’ interests and
learning styles)?

How to present it?

Save your file with your name and upload it in the virtual platform in the
corresponded link.

Check the submission deadline in our course timetable. If you have any questions, you
can contact me or your regional teacher any time.

Copyright © 2017
Adapted by Mauricio Martinez for Santo Tomas University
Based on an activity by Diana Univio and Alexandra Moreno Castillo
2015-2017 All rights reserved.