Needs Analysis and Course Design in ESP

Posted on Feb 5, 2025 in Other civil servant exams

Unit 2: Needs Analysis

The goal of ESP courses is to teach the language and communication skills that specific groups of language learners need or will need to function effectively in their disciplines of study, professions, or workplaces.

ESP course design includes a stage in which the teachers identify what specific language and skills the group of learners will need.

The identification of language and skills is used in determining and refining the contents, objectives, approaches, and materials for the ESP course. It can also be used to assess learners and whether the course was successful at the end.

Perhaps the main distinguishing feature between ESP and General English teaching is that in ESP, there is an explicit awareness that learners have some specific needs that have to be addressed in the course. Over the years, needs analysis has become increasingly sophisticated.

Target Situation Analysis

In the early years of ESP, needs analysis was construed as a simple pre-course procedure involving analysis of the target situation.

• Phase 3: Target Situation Analysis.

Needs analysis should be concerned with the establishment of communicative needs and their realizations, resulting from an analysis of the communication in the target situation – what I will refer to as target situation analysis. (adapted from Chambers 1980, p. 29)

Metaphor of a journey: the focus was on the destination of the journey but not on the journey in itself.

Only necessities or objective needs. Target situation analysis aimed to determine priorities, such as which skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) and which situations, such as speaking on the telephone or writing minutes from meetings, were more or less important in the target situation.

Current Needs Analysis

First, the notion of lacks was introduced, together with present situation analysis to identify the present situation.

Lacks are the discrepancies between the present situation (what the students know or can do in English) and the target situation (what the students should know or be able to do in English to function in the target situation).

Metaphor of a journey: present situation analysis represents the point of departure of the journey and the target situation represents the destination.

Metaphor of a journey: we also need to consider how we are going to get from the point of departure to the destination, so the route we will follow and the means of transport.

• Means analysis and learning needs analysis.
• Identifying the constraints and opportunities in the teaching situation and gathering information on the classroom culture, learner factors, teacher profiles, and the status of language teaching in the institution, among others.

Needs Analysis – Definition

Needs analysis in ESP refers to a course development process. In this process, the language and skills that the learners will use in their target professional or vocational workplace or in their study areas are identified and considered in relation to the present state of knowledge of the learners, their perceptions of their needs, and the practical possibilities and constraints of the teaching context. The information obtained from this process is used in determining and refining the content and method of the ESP course. (Basturkmen 2010, p. 19)

Needs Analysis – Four Processes

• Target situation analysis: Identification of tasks, activities, and skills learners are/will be using English for; what the learners should ideally know and be able to do at the end of the course (including language, rhetorical/discourse patterns, and genres/text-types).
• Present situation analysis: Identification of what the learners do and do not know and can or cannot do in relation to the target situation.
• Learner factor analysis: Identification of learner factors such as their motivation, how they learn, and their perceptions of their needs.
• Means analysis: Identification of factors related to the environment in which the course will run. Consideration of what the ESP course and teacher can offer (realistically speaking).

Needs Analysis – Types of Needs

1. Target needs: what the leaner needs to do in the target situation (in general terms).
   • a. Necessities
   • b. Lacks
   • c. Wants
2. Learning needs: learner factors and means.

• Necessities (or objective needs): the demands of the target situation; what the learner has to know to function effectively in the target situation.
• Observe what situations the learner will need to be involved in and then analyze the characteristics of those situations.
• Lacks: The gaps between the target knowledge and skills, on the one hand, and the current knowledge and skills of the learners.
• For example, one necessity might be to read and understand texts in a particular subject area. Whether or not the learners need instruction in doing this, and if so, how much, will depend on how well they can already do it.
• Depending on the current knowledge of our students, we might need to devote more or less time (or even none at all) to a certain necessity.
• Not all necessities have to figure prominently in an ESP course, only those in which our students require or lack instruction.
• Wants: The views learners have about their own target needs.
• Learners may have an idea of the necessities of the target situation, and they probably also have an idea of their lacks.
• It is quite possible that these ideas do not match the results of target situation analysis and present situation analysis as carried out by the teacher.
• We also need to gather information on what their wants are and address them in our course.

Most frequent methods to identify target needs:

• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Observation (e.g. of target situation)
• Data collection (e.g. gathering specialized texts)
• Informal consultation with sponsors, learners, and others.

Needs Analysis – Learning Needs

Metaphor of a journey: we have focused so far on the point of departure and the destination (in both objective and subjective terms), but we also need to consider the route.

This is what we mean by learning needs: factors pertaining to the learners and the learning process to be considered when designing an ESP course.

Box kite activity (Herbolich 1979) for engineers: design and build a box kite, and write a brief manual explaining how to build it.

Reasons for choosing a box kite as the focus of this activity: “The mechanism should be”

1. relatively new to the students
2. related to the field of Engineering
3. a device which allows the attainment of new lexis
4. a device which will actually work
5. enjoyable to build and test.

Task-Based Needs Analysis

Task-based needs analysis derives from the methodological framework called task-based language teaching and the notion of language tasks.

There are several independent reasons for considering tasks as the basic unit of analysis in needs analysis.

• First of all, it can be integrated within a whole course following the task-based language teaching method, which in fact is a method that fits rather well with the principles of ESP.

Five additional reasons:

1. One of the possible sources of information to identify learner needs is already made job descriptions produced by experts in different sectors. Most of these descriptions are already made with tasks as the main unit of analysis.
2. Experts in a particular field can provide valid information about the work they do in terms of tasks but not in terms of language. Conceptualizing needs in terms of tasks helps to avoid two common problems in ESP course design: the subject expert’s usual lack of linguistic knowledge and ESP practitioner’s usual lack of content knowledge.
3. Needs analyses focused on purely linguistic elements tend to result in lists of decontextualized grammatical or lexical items. Task-based needs analysis provides information on how, or to what ends, the grammatical or lexical items are used in the target situations.
4. Similar problems can be found in purely linguistic needs analyses considering also the level of the text/discourse. Traditional linguistic or text-based needs analyses reflect a product orientation, that is, they focus on the end result. Task-based needs analysis focuses on the specific tasks that need to be performed in order to reach the product (process oriented).
5. The results of task-based needs analyses lend themselves quite easily as input for task-based foreign language courses (or communicative courses in general terms), whose features fit rather well what language acquisition research has revealed about L2 developmental processes in and out of classrooms.

Five steps in order to design a course following the task-based method:

1. Conduct a task-based target situation and present situation analyses to identify the learners’ current and future target tasks.
2. Classify the target tasks into target task types: more general categories of tasks.
3. From the target task types, derive pedagogic tasks, which have to be adjusted to factors such as the learners’ age, proficiency level, and other learner factors. Pedagogic tasks are the actual materials and activities that teachers and students work on in the classroom.
4. Sequence the pedagogic tasks to form a task syllabus.
5. Implement the syllabus with appropriate methodology and pedagogy.

Task-Based Language Teaching

A teaching method that has figured prominently in the fields of second/foreign language acquisition for the last 20 years or so.

It emerged around the 1980s as a reaction to methods which were teacher-centered and form-oriented.

Task-based language teaching is an approach to language education in which students are given functional tasks that invite them to focus primarily on meaning rather than form and to use language for real-world, non-linguistic purposes.

What particular language learning goals need to be reached by the learner? If you carry out needs analysis in the broader sense of the term, then you are designing an ESP course. If you don’t conduct needs analysis, then probably you are designing a GE course, or an ESP course which probably will not be very successful.

Overarching goal: all modern language courses nowadays aim to develop learners’ ability to use the target language in real communicative situations.

But there are huge practical differences depending on the teaching methodology we adopt when it comes to deciding smaller operational goals.

• Syllabuses that formulate specific goals in terms of linguistic content vs. those which formulate specific goals in terms of language use.
• Task-based syllabuses belong to the second type, as they focus on the purposes for which people are learning a language, meaning the tasks that learners will need to be able to perform.
• A match with ESP principles and goals.

But what is a task?

• For the purposes of language teaching, a task needs to be related to language, although tasks do not necessarily have to involve language.

Definition of language task: A task is an activity in which a person engages in order to attain an objective, and which necessitates the use of language. (Van den Branden 2006, p. 4).

• Language in task-based teaching is seen as a means to an end, a tool we use to achieve some goals that require the use of language.
• So, defining the language learning goals of a course in the task based teaching method is then a matter of describing the tasks the language learner needs to be able to perform describing the kind of language use that the performance of these tasks requires.

But how is language acquired in task-based language teaching?

• People not only learn language in order to make functional use of it, but also they learn it by making functional use of it.
• E.g., if we want our learners to be able to understand and give directions, they should be exposed to functional tasks in which they have to give and understand directions.
• There should be a close link between the tasks performed by learners in the language classroom and in the outside world.

1. Identify target tasks:
   • We first generate a list of potentially relevant domains and language use situations, which is then refined and completed.
   • From this list, the most crucial domains and language use situations are selected.
   • Then, we do tasks from these lists: domains and situations only describe contexts in which language is used, but do not specify what particular things a language learner should do with language in order to function in these situations.
2. Classify target tasks into target task types:
   • Different ways of clustering and classifying concrete language tasks into more abstract task types have been proposed in the ESP literature.
   • The idea is to try to group specific language tasks into more general types on the basis of their common characteristics.
   • To classify specific language tasks into more general types, we need a set of parameters to serve as a guide in our classification process.
   • This set of parameters can be generated in two ways:
     • Top-down: we start with a set of fixed pre-determined parameters and then we the specific tasks into task types following these parameters.
     • Bottom-up: we start from the extensive list of concrete language tasks and try to derive a set of parameters that is relevant and specific to the tasks we have.

Analytical Procedures in Needs Analysis

In ESP it is essential that we conduct an analysis of learner needs as a first step in course design.

This analysis cannot be exclusively based on anecdotal comments by some students, on teachers’ past experiences, or on the assessment of the situation carried out by people who are not language experts.

Needs analysis must be systematic and methodologically rigorous so as to be able to extract valid conclusions: Sources of information Methods.

Five main sources of information:

1. Published and unpublished literature on the topic
2. Learners
3. Teachers and language experts
4. Domain/subject experts
5. Other relevant stakeholders,

Triangulation in needs analysis:

• a. Triangulation of sources: we use the same method (e.g. a questionnaire) but we apply it to different sources of information (e.g. learners, teachers and subject experts).
• b. Triangulation of methods: when we apply different methods (e.g. questionnaires, interviews, and observation) to the same source of information (e.g. subject experts). This is the case even if we examine different samples of the same type of informants (e.g. different groups of subject experts).
• c. Triangulation of both sources and methods: for instance, using questionnaires, interviews and observations with learners, teachers and subject experts.

Two main types/categories of methods:

• Inductive: for example, expert intuitions, participant and nonparticipant observation, or unstructured interviews, from which we can derive categories of needs.
• Deductive: they employ more systematized instruments and tools, like questionnaires, structured interviews or performance tests, which already have some pre-determined categories of needs.

Main methods in needs analysis:

1. Expert and non-expert intuitions
2. Interviews
3. Questionnaires
4. Participant and non-participant observation
5. Journals and logs
6. Tests
7. Language audits

Fundamental Background Concepts

Questions to guide our process of course design:

1. Why does the student need to learn?
2. Who is going to be involved in the process?
3. Where is the learning going to take place? What opportunities does the place offer? What limitations does it impose?
4. When is the learning going to take place? How much time is available? How will it be distributed?
5. What does the learner need to learn? What aspect of language will be needed and how will it be described? What level of proficiency must be achieved? What topic areas will need to be covered?
6. How will the learning be achieved? What learning theory will underlie the course? What kind of methodology will be employed?

Language Descriptions

Various language descriptions that have been developed by successive schools of thought in linguistics.

It is important to understand the main features of each of these descriptions in order to consider how they can be used most appropriately in ESP courses.

Six main theories of language:

1. Classical/traditional grammar
2. Structural linguistics
3. (Transformational) generative grammar
4. Language variation and register analysis
5. Functional grammar
6. Discourse/rhetorical analysis

1. Classical/Traditional Grammar

• All the theories and descriptions of language until the 20th century.
• Descriptions of English and other languages were based on the grammars of classical languages: Greek and Latin.
• Focus on the function that each word had in the sentence.
• Reason: Greek and Latin were case-based languages in which the function of each word in the sentence was signaled by means of a suffix.

2. Structural Linguistics

• Language was described in terms of structures which carry fundamental propositions: e.g., statement, interrogative, negative, imperative, etc. grammatical notions: e.g., tense, number, aspect, gender, etc.
• By changing the words in these structures, we can generate sentences with different meanings.
• English teaching: the development of the substitution table and other similar activities to explain grammatical patterns.

3. (Transformational) Generative Grammar

• Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky.
• Structural descriptions of language were too superficial, because they only described the surface structure but could not explain other relationships of meaning which were not explicit.
• Example:
  • a. John is easy to please.
  • b. John is eager to please.
• Same functions and surface relations: “John” is the subject, and “easy/eager to please” are both complements of the verb “is”.
• But in (a) John is the one who is pleased, while in (b) John is the one doing the pleasing.

4. Language Variation and Register Analysis

• If we view language as part of a communicative whole, it shows considerable variation depending on the type of communicative situation we are involved in.
• A communicative situation is made up of a combination of several factors (e.g., interlocutors, medium, topic, etc.), and if we change some of these factors, the language also changes.
• Register analysis: if language varies according to the context of use, then it should be possible to describe the language associated with a specific context, such as a particular discipline, and use this description as the basis for a course.

5. Functional Grammar

• 1970s: the Council of Europe’s efforts to establish models of syllabuses that could be applied to the teaching and learning of different languages.
• These models could not be done on the basis of formal descriptions, because languages differ a lot in this respect.
• Function was a more adequate unit of analysis for this purpose.
• Functions: categories of human thought and social behaviors.

6. Discourse/Rhetorical Analysis

• Until this point, language was viewed in terms of the sentence.
• The next development was to go beyond the level of the sentence to focus on the level of discourse or text.
• Focus: how meaning is generated by combining sentences.
• The context of the sentence is important to create meaning, and by context here we refer to the other sentences with which one sentence occurs.

Language Descriptions

Various language descriptions that have been developed by successive schools of thought in linguistics.

• But earlier types of language descriptions are not wrong; they are incomplete.

All communication has a structural level, a functional level, and a discoursal/rhetorical level; they are not mutually exclusive.

• On the contrary, they are complementary and they all should have a place in an ESP course:
• Language structures: e.g., grammar and vocabulary, rules and patterns to form sentences.
• Functions: what we use language for.
• Discoursal/rhetorical patterns: how to combine sentences to create larger texts or dialogues, as well as the features of different text types associated with specific contexts of use.

Language Skills

• Four macro-skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
• These macro-skills also figure prominently in ESP, particularly from phase 4 onwards (skills and strategies approach).
• To answer the question “What does the learner need to learn?”, we also need to consider this dimension.

Learning Theories

The starting point for all language teaching should be an understanding of how people learn.

• But this is not always the case in ESP, which has focused more on language description and the analysis of needs.

Yet, language can only be properly understood as a reflection of human thought processes.

• Language learning is conditioned by the way in which the mind interprets, organizes and stores information.
• In other words, the key to successful language learning and teaching is not a very detailed and careful analysis of language but an understanding of the structure and processes of the mind.

There have been four stages of development:

1. Behaviorism
2. Mentalism
3. Cognitivism
4. Affective factors

1. Behaviorism

• Based on the work of Pavlov in the Soviet Union and Skinner in the US.
• Learning is a mechanical process of habit formation which proceeds by means of the frequent repetition and reinforcement of a stimulus-response sequence.
• The foundation of the Audiolingual Method of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Based on the behaviorist stimulus-response concept but also on the assumption that foreign language learning should reflect and imitate the processes of first language learning.

2. Mentalism

• Noam Chomsky questioned the whole idea of stimulus-response as being all there is to learning.
• He asked how it was possible to apply what was learnt in a stimulus-response sequence to new situations if learning was just repetition.
• Chomsky’s conclusion was that we don’t learn patterns, but rather a set of rules that we can use to deal with infinite situations.
• This means that the mind does not establish a connection between one stimulus and one response, but rather uses individual stimuli to derive an underlying system of rules.

3. Cognitivism

• In behaviorism, learners were seen as a passive receiver of information
• The cognitive view takes learners to be active in the learning process.
• Learning is then a process in which the learner actively tries to make sense of data, and learning can be said to take place when the learner is able to extract some meaningful interpretation of the data.
• The basic teaching technique is the problem-solving task.

4. Affective Factors

• People think and reason, but they also have feeling and emotions.
• However, the influence of feelings and emotions was disregarded in learning and teaching until not so long ago.
• The cognitive view of learning completely disregarded this component: in cognitivism, the assumption was that learners learn when they actively think about something.
• But in order for this to happen, learners must first want to think about it.

The Grammar-Translation Method

Advantages:

• Emphasis on grammatical accuracy (necessary to be considered fluent in a language).
• Connection between L1 and L2 understanding of the structures of the L1 and L2.
• Progression of reading and writing skills is ensured.

Disadvantages:

• Lack of speaking and listening activities and excessive emphasis on writing and reading.
• Monotonous teaching method (boring).
• Not very creative (only at higher levels).
• Excessive use of L1 and almost no use of TL. Understanding the structure of the TL through the L1.
• The method puts great strain on students’ memories by having to memorize endless lists of grammatical rules and vocabulary.

Main characteristics

• Reading and writing are the center of the class: there is no place for listening and speaking.
• Grammar and syntax are extremely important for language learning. Grammar is taught deductively.
• Vocabulary is emphasized and it is learnt through memorizing long lists of words or phrases.
• There is almost no use of the TL in the class, except for translation.
• The medium of instruction is the L1.

The Direct Method

Historical background

• The Direct method is sometimes also known as The Natural Method or The Reform Method. What is the meaning of these names?
• Direct Meaning is to be conveyed directly in the TL/L2 through the use of demonstration and visual aids, with no recourse to the students’ native language.
• Natural Methodology of this method was based on the way babies and children acquire their mother tongue, that is, by listening to the language in large quantities, by being exposed to the language.
• Reform Language learning/teaching needed to be modified to meet the needs of the people.

Inductive vs. deductive learning:

Inductive learning

• No explicit explanation is provided.
• Students should notice or make generalizations from the examples provided.
• Students are thought to be more involved if an inductive approach is applied.
• Students will probably understand and remember more if something is taught inductively.

Deductive learning

• Explicit explanation of what is to be taught (direct instruction).
• A more predictive way of learning since the teacher decides what information to provide and how to structure it.
• This approach is more time-effective, especially if a lot of different numbers or facts are to be presented.

Advantages:

• Speaking is emphasized; students actually learn to communicate orally.
• Pronunciation is practiced during the lessons.
• Students are encouraged to correct themselves and think for themselves about their use of the TL more active/independent.
• Students learn to think in the foreign language since translation is avoided.
• Use of paraphrasing by the teacher encourages students to learn and use this skill as a resource.
• All interaction is made in the TL beneficial if students speak different L1.

Disadvantages:

• Even though it is more holistic than grammar-translation, reading and writing are not emphasized enough.
• Difficulty of achieving real language use since the classroom is an artificial environment.
• Complete avoidance of L1 could be counterproductive in some cases (it might be useful to recur to it on some occasions to explain something briefly).

The Audiolingual Method

Theoretical assumptions/principles

• The main purpose of learning a language is to learn how to use it in communication with other people primacy of speech
• To be able to communicate accurately in the TL students need to be trained in the use of sentence grammar structures. Grammar is taught inductively through the presentation of examples.
• Pronunciation is also crucial and is typically taught from the very beginning of the learning process.
• Learners need to learn to use the TL automatically without thinking and for this reason patterns need to be repeated over and over again so that they are over-learnt.
• Old habits in the L1 of the students should be overcome by forming new habits in the TL.

Advantages:

• The method does develop the oral skills of learners, particularly pronunciation.
• Learners through the Audiolingual Method are able to participate in situational contexts competently.
• Learners are more aware of the phonetic aspects of the language. Through modeling and mimicry, learners pay more attention to proper pronunciation and intonation.
• Learners are sensitive to the intonation and are aware of the different functions of questioning, requesting, pleading, etc.
• Errors in pronunciation are immediately dealt with, while correct responses are positively reinforced.

Disadvantages:

• Drills leave no room for creativity, causing learners to lose interest or feel bored in the classroom. When learners lose their motivation, it negatively affects their progress in second language learning.
• New vocabulary learnt is also limited in context. Instead, the sound system and grammatical patterns are emphasized. Learners are taught set phrases in response to certain questions. Consequently, learners are only drilled to respond correctly with answers that are expected of them without caring much for its meaning.
• Learners of the Audiolingual Method may be able to participate in conversations, but they are rarely spontaneous. If they are not able to recall the set phrases that have been learnt, they are at a loss as to how to respond to the questions and conversational prompts of the other speaker.

Total Physical Response

Historical background • One of the most well-known humanistic approaches to language teaching. Humanistic methods developed in the 1970s and 1980s and are characterized by the following features or principles: • Based on the individual: more learner-centered than previous approaches. • Focus on learners’ emotional factors: encouragement and positive feelings to reduce stress and anxiety. • Not based on any particular theory or view of language, but rather on psychology and psycholinguistics. Language learning is thought to be a socially and psychologically conditioned phenomenon. • Constituted a break with earlier methods used in the 1960s in the sense of avoiding mechanical techniques (e.g., drill): Establish a sense of group community among the students and place emphasis on students rather than teachers. ADVANTAGES:  The important role of comprehension.  Reducing stress and anxiety in learners (issues which are typically present when learning a new language).  It is fun, especially for young children.  It is suitable for kinesthetic students who need to be active in class.  It can be used in small, medium, and large classes.  It involved activating both the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  It is easy for teachers to prepare (not much material is needed). DISADVANTAGES:  It is not designed to be a comprehensive method. It represents a set of teaching ideas rather than a complete method (need for it to be complemented with other methods).  As students progress in the target language it gets more difficult to express every concept with commands and movements. It is really only suitable for beginner levels.  It can become a bit too repetitive.  Students might find it embarrassing (anxiety/stressed induced?)  Emphasis on accuracy is not a priority; it occurs (too) late in the process. THE SILENT WAY Historical background • One of the methods in second language teaching which was most heavily influenced by the principles of the cognitive approach is The Silent Way, which was developed by the educational material designer Galeb Gattegno in the early 1960s. • According to Gattegno, “the mind is an active agent capable of constructing its own inner criteria for learning.” • It is based on the belief that teaching should be subordinated to learning and that the process of learning is considered an initiation to using our own inner resources (i.e., existing cognitive structures, experiences, emotions, and knowledge of the world) to meet the challenges we encounter. This is how we absorb knowledge from our environment. • Key words of this philosophy: independence, autonomy, and responsibility. • Five basic principles and assumptions of The Silent Way: 1) Teaching should be subordinated to learning 2) Learning is nor primarily imitation or drill 3) In learning the mind equips itself by its own working, trial and error, deliberate experimentation, etc. 4) As it works, the mind draws on everything it has already acquired, particularly its experience in learning the L1. 5) If the teacher’s activity is to be subordinate to that of the learner, then the teacher must stop interfering with and sidetracking that activity: “teach, then test, then get out of the way” (Hadley 2001) The principal goals ofThe Silent Way: • To help students develop an independence from the teacher and become autonomous learners who are fully engaged in the learning process. • To teach students how to learn a language by making them responsible for their own learning. • To achieve native-like fluency in theTL. ADVANTAGES:  Students are responsible for their own learning, which might increase their motivation to learn.  Self-correction is helpful and makes students think for themselves.  Pronunciation is emphasized.  It is OK for students to improve at their own pace and this might make students less stressed and anxious. DISADVANTAGES:  There is no exposure to real language in use.  Material used does not represent authentic language.  Manuals for teachers are generally not available. Teachers are responsible for designing and sequencing instruction.

(DE)SUGGESTOPEDIA Historical background • The method was developed in Bulgaria in the 1970s by the psychiatrist and educator Georgi Lozanov. • It is based on the non-conscious or subconscious influences that human beings are believed to have when learning. • The current name (i.e. desuggestopedia) of the method derives from the fact that certain limitations or barriers in the language learning process need to be “desuggested” or minimized to make it more efficient. • Lozanov believed that language learning can occur much faster than what is usually the case. He pointed out that this is due to the fact that most methods are used to teach do not activate our full range of mental powers, but use only 5-10 % of our capacities. For this reason, our limitations, in the form of psychological barriers (e.g., stress, anxiety, fear) need to be “desuggested.” • Learning is directed to both the left and right hemispheres of the brain; both the conscious and unconscious mind is used. • Two teaching principles are used to break down the sociopsychological constraints of traditional learning environments: • Infantilization: Through the use of activities which can be seen as childish (e.g., songs for children), students can recapture the type of learning capacities they had when they were children and acquired their L1. • Pseudopassivity: Reaching a relaxed physical state where the mental activity and concentration of students is heightened. The principal goals of Desuggestopedia are: •To accelerate the process of learning to use a foreign language for everyday communication  learn the language at a faster rate. •To overcome possible limitations in the process and access our subconscious part of the mind. ADVANTAGES:  The method pays close attention to learners’ emotions and mental state.  Positive environment to learn the language.  All skills emphasized to some degree (more holistic).  Avoidance of repetition and mechanical exercises (a lot of variation).  Not rigid when it comes to use of L1 andTL (mix of both languages). DISADVANTAGES:  Materials are prepared by the teacher rather than authentic  artificial language use.  Difficulty of applying in many current education systems due to class sizes, fixed furniture, etc.  Teachers might no be able to provide an environment as that proposed by the method due to lack of control of the classroom in which they teach (they might share it with other teachers). COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH Historical background • The Communicative Approach arose in the 1970s as a reaction to the Audiolingual method, which paid more attention to structure than to its function. • The attack on Audiolingual beliefs resulted from changes in American linguistic theory in the 1960s. • Noam Chomsky: performance vs. competence. • But also from British applied linguists who emphasized another fundamental dimension of language: its functional and communicative potential. • Communicative competence: language learning as the learning of communicative proficiency rather than the mastery of structures. MAIN CHARACTERISTICS • The goal of language teaching is for the learner to develop communicative competence. • Language learning is learning to communicate in that language. • Attempts to communicate are encouraged from the very beginning. • The target linguistic system is best learnt through the process of struggling to communicate. ADVANTAGES:  Teaching is focused on real world language use.  The role of the learner in the teaching-learning process is emphasized: the learners’ perceptions, feelings and attitudes are taken into account. The learner is also encouraged to work independently from the teacher, through pair and group work.  The role of the teacher is to help learners in any way that motivates them to work with the language and to facilitate the communication process. DISADVANTAGES:  Is this approach suitable for all levels? Many teachers consider that the functional syllabus is more suitable for intermediate students, who have already learnt the basic grammatical items.  Is it a good idea to abandon the procedures of structure-based methods? It is argued that students must inevitably learn the grammar of the language. They’ll still have to drill structures and organize grammatical items into a suitable form of grading.

TASK-BASED LEARNING Historical background • At some point during the 1970s there existed a shift in focus; specialists in the field started focusing on the learning tasks that students performed. • It was believed that tasks could be used to create opportunities in which learners could put the TL into practice by using whatever linguistic resources they had. • The idea of basing the learning process on tasks did not start to gain ground until the 1980s, following a publication by Breen & Candlin (1980;The essentials of a communicative curriculum in language teaching), and it became very popular from the 1990s and onwards. • Before this publication, it was seen as a branch of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method. • However, Breen & Candlin (1980) showed that it should be considered on its own as it was in fact different enough. Even though TBL does not contradict CLT as communication is crucial, TBL advocates believe that language forms should not be prescribed in advance. Instead, learners should be free to use the language they can to complete the tasks given to them. MAIN GOALS AND OBJECTIVES The principal goals ofTBL are to: • Create contexts where learners’ natural learning capacity can be enhanced instead of trying to learn the language bit by bit through systematic techniques. • Introduce analytic syllabuses to the process in order to help students use the TL in an active and meaningful way (as opposed to synthetic syllabuses, which comprise different linguistic units that need to be learnt in a specific order). Features of the learning process A task sequence consists of 3 phases: 1. Pre-task phase: The topic/theme is presented and defined by the teacher who highlights some useful expressions. S/he also gives the instructions for the task and checks that students understand them. If the following task is focused, the teacher will also help students activate grammatical structures and vocabulary that will be needed to complete the task. 2. Task-cycle phase: This phase consists of 3 sub-phases: • Task: carrying out the task, typically in pairs or groups. • Planning: preparation of a report explaining how the task was carried out. • Report: presentation of the task in front of the class. Alternatively, this sub-phase may involve students displaying their work. 3. Language-focus phase or task follow-up: During this phase, explicit language instruction takes place. Often activities are introduced to identify and analyze certain features of language which can be valuable for the task. Emphasis is also given to problems or frequent errors. ADVANTAGES:  It promotes attention to meaning.  The communication strategies of students are developed and enhanced.  Students become proficient at problem-solving.  Avoidance of repetition and mechanical exercises (a lot of variation).  The method makes learners more aware of the learning process as they are more involved in it  learner-centered approach. DISADVANTAGES:  It might be dangerous to focus so much on communicative abilities and achieving fluency. This might lead to a gain of fluency at the expense of accuracy.  Students beginning to learn a language might not have the capabilities to direct their own learning process. The same can be said about young learners as their intellectual capacities are not sufficient for them to take on this kind of responsibility.  Teachers might find it difficult to design genuine and meaningful tasks (that focus on information and knowledge to be used in the real world).

APPROACHES TO COURSE DESIGN • Course design is the process by which the raw data we extracted from the preliminary analysis of needs is interpreted in order to produce a series of teaching-learning experiences with the goal of getting the students to reach a desired level of competence or knowledge. • In practical terms, it involves the use of the information we have extracted from needs analysis: to produce a syllabus, to select/adapt/write materials, to develop/select a methodology (or a series of methods), to establish the evaluation procedures that we will use to assess the improvement of our students and the success of the course in general.

• We can identify some approaches to course design that have figured prominently in ESP throughout its brief history. • These are: 1. language-centred course design 2. skills-centred course design 3. learning-centred course design 1. Language-centred course design: • The simplest approach to course design and the one that most English teachers are familiar with. • It is quite prevalent in ESP. • It aims to establish the most direct connection possible between the analysis of target situation and the content of the ESP course. 1. Language-centred course design: weaknesses • It starts from the learners and their needs, but it is not learner-centred in any meaningful sense of the term. • The learner is simply used to identify the target situation: instead of taking English as a whole and teaching it to the students (as in GE), only a specific area of the language is taught. • It is rather static and inflexible. • Once the initial analysis of the target situation is done, the teacher designs the course and implements it without any changes or deviations from the established route. • There is no room for feedback, but what is the initial analysis is wrong or incomplete? • We must always leave room for possible modifications. •No room for learning factors. • The assumption is that by describing the language to the students, they will learn it. • In sum, the simplicity and logical nature of the language-centred approach (which make it an attractive approach and thus one resorted to quite commonly by ESP practitioners) are also its main weaknesses: it is too simple to really work in real situations and learning is not always logical but emotional.2. Skills-centred course design: • This approach is based on two fundamental principles. • First, the basic assumption is that there are a series of common skills and strategies underlying any linguistic behaviour, which the learner uses to comprehend and produce language. • Second, it establishes a distinction between goal-oriented and process-oriented courses. • Goal-oriented courses aim to reach a series of ideal pre-established objectives. • Usually there is not enough time to reach them all during the course and some students might not even be in a position to reach them when they start the course. • E.g., goal of a hypothetical ESP course: ‘to be able to read the literature of the students’ specialism in a foreign language’. Not something you can achieve in one course . If the learners are first-year university students, they may not even be familiar with the literature of their field in their mother tongue, let alone be able to read it in a foreign language. • Goal-oriented courses work under the assumption that many students will fail the course. 2. Skills-centred course design: roles of needs analysis • It provides a basis for discovering the underlying competence that allows people to perform effectively in the target situation. • Second, it allows the ESP practitioner to discover the knowledge and abilities of learners when they start the course. • The skills-centred approach takes the learner more into account than the language-centred approach: • it understands language in terms of how people process and use it • it tries to build from what the learners already know and can do • the objectives are open-ended: learners achieve what they can during the course 2. Skills-centred course design: weaknesses • It still views the learner as a user of the language rather than as a learner. • The processes it focuses on are the processes of language use, not the processes of language learning. • As in the language-centred approach, the learner is used to identify the target situation, but then no further reference is made to the learner needs. 3. Learning-centred course design: • A language-centred approach says ‘This is the nature of the target situation and that will determine the ESP course’. • A skills-centred approach says ‘That is not enough. We must look beyond the language to discover the processes that enable people to function in the target situation. Those processes will determine the ESP course’. • A learning-centred approach says ‘That is not enough either. We must look beyond the processes that allow people to function in the target situation (and of course beyond the language) to focus on how someone acquires this knowledge and abilities’. • A hypothetical scenario at the level of course design. • A needs analysis reveals that the ESP learners need English in order to be able to read texts in their subject specialism. They have no need to write, speak or listen to English. • If we followed a language-centred or skills-centred approach to course design, we would conclude that our lessons should only deal with the activity of reading texts. There would be no listening work, discussion would be kept to a minimum and there would be (almost) no writing tasks. • But, if we took a learning-centred approach, we would need to ask ourselves further questions and consider other factors.