Needs Analysis
From the ICAL TEFL wiki
Needs Analysis is a simple concept and an extremely important one at the same time.
Essentially it is the process of assessing the needs of your students. In other words, why they are in the classroom. Once this has been established, the syllabus and individual lessons can be designed to suit those needs.
Combined with this are the wants of the students. What the student needs and what the student wants are not always the same thing though.
The first step is to find out what the needs of your students are. You can do this by simply questioning them with simple questions like this:
- Why are you here?
- What do you hope to gain from this course?
- How long have you been learning English?
- How good is your spoken English?
- Do you use English in your job?
Alternatively (or as well as) you could give them language tests to find out their current abilities.
These kinds of questions will tell you two things. Firstly they will tell what the students' current level is and secondly they will tell you what the student needs to know. In other words, you will establish what the needs of the student are.
Needs analysis does not end when you have the answers to these questions. With each class you should be updating the needs analysis so that every lesson is both suitable to the students' level and relevant to the students' needs.
Once you have the needs you need to make sure that each lesson and element of the lesson is aimed towards those needs. If, for example, the needs analysis of a class shows you that the class needs to learn English for business, then the examples you use to explain the language should all be about business.
