Needs Analysis
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 (or student if you are doing this for a 1-to-1 lesson). In other words, why they are in the classroom and what they want to get out of the lessons, what they need to know and what interests them.
Once this has been established, the syllabus and individual lessons can be designed to suit those needs. Put basically, you find out what your students need to learn and then teach them this.
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Assessing Students
The first step is to find out what the needs of your students are, i.e. why they want to learn English. 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?
- Do you use English in your job?
- Why do you want to improve your English?
This will give you a rough idea of what your students want to learn. They may be heading towards and examination they need; they may want to travel and work in another country; they may just be doing it for pleasure or for a myriad of other reasons.
The next step is to find out what your students already know. To do this you can use placement tests which are designed to categorise your students in certain levels. Most commonly these tests will tell you if your student is:
Different schools use different ways of categorising students however.
In some cases placement tests aren't practical especially in the cases of private lessons with just one or two students. An alternative here is simply to talk to the student about general topics. By doing this you'll get a rough idea of how good that student knows English. Of course it isn't perfect but experienced teachers are often able to understand very quickly the level a student is at.
Note that asking a student how good their English is is pretty much a waste of time. It's very difficult if not impossible for most people to make an accurate assessment of their own language abilities!
The final step is to find out the interests of your students. For example, if you ask class of teenagers then you'll likely here subjects like music, fashion, film and so on. If you ask a class of business people you may here things like politics, travel, current affairs and so on.
After the Needs Analysis
Once you have made the needs analysis you can prepare a syllabus for the class and allow you to work out each individual lesson.
- Your lessons will teach your students language they need to know: this could be exam students practising old exam papers, business people having telephone practice or a General English class talking about their favourite sports star.
- The content of your lesson will be of the right level: you will not be trying to teach a Beginner's class the third conditional and likewise you won't be teaching the alphabet to your advanced class!
- The content of the your lessons will also be interesting to your class. When you know that your class all follow the international music scene avidly you can use songs to practice certain grammatical or functional points; when you know your older class enjoys discussing current events you can use clippings from the news as a basis for some activities.
Conclusion
Every single new class or student needs a needs analysis. This will make sure that what you teach them is
a) of the right level b) is useful to them c) of interest to them
