THE IMPORTANCE OF NEEDS ANALYSIS IN ESP COURSE DESIGN AND EVALUATION

Abstract

A lot of researchers have investigated the role of Needs Analysis Questionnaire in English for Specific Purposes Courses. The main purpose of this paper is to prove the importance of the Needs Analysis Questionnaire in enhancing the learning outcomes in English for Specific Purposes courses, which are core subjects and offered to students studying at the Faculty of Contemporary Social Sciences, department of Public Management and Public Policy and the department of Political Sciences at South East European University, Republic of North Macedonia. It also shows how important is needs analysis in course design, materials selection, evaluation and the proposed topics for the course project. The participants in this study were 64 students from both full time and part time study programmes, second and third year attending ESP 1 and ESP 2 courses. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used for the data collection. The survey was done at the beginning of Summer Semester 2021. The evidence was gathered in the form of student needs analysis questionnaires. The results show that students would rather work on an individual projects were the topics will be proposed by them. The majority of Public Management and Public Policy students would like to write about one of the existing Ministries within the Government of the Republic of North Macedonia. On the other hand the Political Science students would rather have a debate on certain political topics, so according to the results they would focus more on the speaking skills. The newly designed ESP1 and ESP 2 syllabi finally showed that during the semester the students were more motivated, and at the end of the semester students’ results and final grades were improved comparing the previous Fall Semester 2020.