I really enjoy course planning. One of my favorite aspects of teaching English is planning a course from the learning outcomes to materials to assessments. It’s quite a lot of work to plan a course from scratch, but it’s also really exciting to have the freedom to design the learning environment and materials for a group of participants.
When embarking on this sort of task, it’s important to begin by learning about stakeholders and course participants. Specifically, it’s important to detail what your learners need and expect to achieve through their work in your course. Conducting a needs assessment or needs analysis is one way to get the information you need to shape your new course or workshop.
What is a needs assessment?
Let’s define needs assessment in the context of teaching and learning English. At its most basic, a needs assessment is a way to collect information about your learners and stakeholders. You can learn about their goals and what they need to achieve through your course. The information you gather through this process can guide your course planning. It can help you focus your energy on aspects of the course that are most important and valuable to your learners.
What a needs assessment looks like greatly depends on your teaching and learning context, stakeholders, and learners. But, the process of conducting a needs analysis might include:
- Collecting information about learner needs and proficiency
- Collecting information about stakeholder expectations and needs
- Using information to draft learning outcomes for your course
- Using information to create materials for your course
Collecting information about learners
There are many ways to collect information about learner needs. Resource considerations like time and budgets will dictate which methods you use for your needs assessment. Ideally, needs assessments happen prior to the start of a new course, but that’s not always possible. In the event you can’t take time before your course begins to collect information about learners, the first couple of class periods could include activities or tasks to assess the needs of learners.
Some ways to collect information about learners include:
- Survey or questionnaire
- Individual or group interviews
- Pre-quiz or diagnostic assessment
- Group discussions
When assessing learner needs, you’re looking to learn more about language proficiency and learner needs/preferences. A good needs assessment can help you understand where your learners are and what they need from your course.
English for professional purposes
I started teaching an English for Professional Purposes course online a couple of months ago. In order to prepare for the course, I developed a needs assessment to gather information about course participants and stakeholders in the course.
The course was developed as a part of the English Language Programs Virtual Educator Program in conjunction with the Public Institute of Administration in Bahrain. Stakeholders for the project work within human resources in the institute, and the course participants are employees at the institute. The course takes place online, and it includes live synchronous meetings in addition to online communication.
Assessing stakeholder needs
When I was asked to help plan the English for Professional Purposes course, the stakeholders within the administration at the institute had some specific ideas about what they hoped participants would gain from working through the course. From the beginning, these stakeholders were primarily concerned with participants gaining overall proficiency and confidence in their ability to use English in their work. In order to learn a bit more about what they wanted the course to be, I conducted an informal survey of the stakeholders via email.
The questions I asked were:
- Will the participants meet in person? Or all remotely? I think it would be easier to choose one or the other rather than having a mix of both.
- Do users have Google accounts? Would they be open to creating accounts to use Google Classroom?
- What do participants expect with regard to how the course will be presented? Will they be open, for example, to working in small groups and pairs?
- Do participants expect work outside of the synchronous meeting times? Or should we do all of the work during our meeting times?
- What would the top 3 outcomes be for this project from your perspective? At the end of the course, participants will be able to…
- From your perspective, what skills are most important for participants to build? Are there specific tasks we should focus on? (Talking on the phone, running a meeting, emailing, giving a presentation, etc)
From my perspective, the main areas I needed information about before planning the course were related to logistics of course delivery, student expectations (from their perspective), and administrative expectations. The stakeholders got back to me with answers to these questions, and I tried to integrate their responses into my course planning.
Assessing participant needs
When it comes to participant needs, I wanted to learn about participant language proficiency as well as their learning expectations and specific needs. To get a better sense of these things, I created an online survey using Google Forms as well as a synchronous speaking assessment in the form of a brief small group interview.
Informal survey
The form asked for basic information about participants like what they prefer to be called during our course meetings, how long they’ve studied English, and how they feel when they need to use English at work. I also asked questions about specific tasks they need to do at work in English because I wanted to get a better idea of which topics and specific professional English skills would be best to focus on during our time together. I also included a simple listening comprehension task in the form. Participants needed to watch a short video clip about cultural diversity and communication and then answer some questions about the content.
Group interviews
For the interviews, I asked participants to come to a live meeting via Zoom. I scheduled two participants for each meeting. The goal of the interview portion of the needs assessment was to get to know the participants a bit more before we started working together as well as to assess their speaking abilities.
The tasks
I used Google Slides to facilitate our interview, and the interview was made up of three tasks. The first task asked participants to introduce themselves and respond to a couple of basic questions. My hope with this task was that they could warm up and get more comfortable with speaking with me. I was also able to listen to their basic speaking skills.
The second task was a basic picture description using a series of images telling a story. I started by describing the first image, and then the participants each described the next two images in the story sequence. This type of picture description task has been used in speaking proficiency assessments for a while, and it is meant to elicit language related to talking about what you see in the pictures as well as describing events in sequence.
Finally, the third task in the interview portion of the needs assessment asked participants to describe and interpret a graph. Since the participants were hoping to build professional English, I wanted to ask them to do something that they might encounter in their workplace. In this task, the participants could describe the data, and they could also extrapolate and talk about what this data might mean for the future. I shared some lesson materials for describing trends and data, and this task was meant to target that skill.
Rating
I developed a simple five-point scale to assess participants’ speaking during the interview, and I took notes about their speaking during the interview. Immediately following the interviews, I rated each participant based on what they said during our meeting.
The purpose of this needs assessment was to give me an idea of where participants were starting out. The information was not meant to give participants feedback about their speaking, so I did not share my ratings or notes with the participants. The simple ratings coupled with my notes allowed me to get a sense of everyone’s speaking proficiency and how their proficiency compared with other participants in the course.
Thoughts and reflection
I didn’t have a lot of time between getting this teaching assignment and implementing the needs assessment, so perhaps some of the work was a bit rushed. We had only a week between when I agreed to teach this course and when the needs assessment process began. That being said, I think the needs assessment I developed served its purpose well. I was able to get the necessary information to shape decisions I made about what to include in the course and where to focus my efforts.
When conducting a needs assessment like this, there are different ways, of course, to go about collecting the information. There are also different considerations to make when rating and evaluating learner responses. For my context, the needs assessment I put together worked well. But, there are some other options to consider if you’re looking to develop your own assessment.
Considerations
With your goals in mind, it might be useful to consider recording speaking assessments. For example, I could have recorded our online interviews and revisited them after our live meetings. This would allow me to evaluate participant speaking in a more in-depth way during the needs assessment. However, this would also take quite a bit more time than taking notes and rating on the spot with broad assessment criteria.
Another thing to consider is the tasks in the interview portion of the assessment. I opted to include two general English tasks and one that relates more closely to professional English because I wanted to get a sense of everyone’s English skills generally. I thought that I could target specific skills based on responses in the online form. In the form, I asked participants to choose which professional English skills they thought would be most useful to focus on during our time together. My thought was that I could use those responses to shape the course content and then adapt the lessons to suit multiple proficiency levels as needed.
A final consideration is related to assessing the needs of stakeholders. I chose to send an informal survey via email to get information about stakeholder needs, but this part of my needs assessment could have been a bit more formal. Using a Google Form, for example, would let me collect the information a bit more formally from all stakeholders. I chose to use email because we had primarily been communicating by email to this point, and one stakeholder was my main contact. Another option, perhaps, could have been to have a live discussion about their needs via Zoom call.
In the end, I thought the needs assessment worked for my context. I was able to get the information I needed to go ahead with developing a course outline and materials.
Materials
If you’re interested in using or adapting the materials, you can find them below. The materials are available for educational use, not for commercial uses.
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