Course design final submission

Course design final submission

The aim of this study is to determine what are the needs of geography students of second semester in the English II course at Cordoba University

Needs Analysis

  According to Nunan (1988, p. 75), ‘needs analysis’  is “a family of procedures for gathering information about learners and about communication tasks.”  Brown  (1995,  p.36)  stated  that the  term  ‘needs  analysis’ refers to  “systematic  collection and analysis  of  all  subjective and objective information necessary to define and validate defensible curriculum processes that satisfy  the  language  learning  requirements  of  students  within  the  context  of  particular institutions that influence the learning and teaching situation”. puts it as the identification of “what learners will be required to do with the foreign language in the target situation,  and  how  learners  might  best  master  the  target  language  during  the  period  of training”. To give a complete set of findings through different methods of data gathering (questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations).

(Target situation analysis)

The conduction of the study leads to the result of the future learners’ needs with knowledge of the area. The learners are expected to use the language firstly at university when working in the classes for developing activities, tasks and project works in order to improve their skills and as a further goal to use it at work. In other words, the language is needed to be applied mostly in terms of fluent and being able to function at the workplace where they will be required to communicate their ideas in spoken and written English by comprehending colleagues’ ideas at the moment of having conversations and reading academic texts in the subject of geography.

1.    Present Situation Analysis

The apprentices need to learn another language because in the field of geography learning a language is no other than this can benefit them when it comes to getting a job, but they want to completely improve their speech and their level of listening since they are indispensable in a communication. The trainees say that through the readings they learn not only grammar but expand their vocabulary they have in books, newspapers etc. The trainees for this course are young people who have a medium level of English. This ESP course will take place in a geography program of the University of Cordoba.

3. Learning situation analysis

The purpose of carrying out this study is to focus on students’ interaction with facilitators and the environment when learning, as the data gathered shows most of the students want to take the English course in order to function at university and sooner at workplace. The students at this stage show a particular motivation towards the learning of the language because it implies some sort of money or even promotions in the future, willing to achieve a certain improvement in all the skills, mostly on speaking. Then, the students’ attitude is to take advantage of the background knowledge they present at the time. The focus group showed a sympathy for reading activities and presentations but also working in the four skills by almost every day practice and immersion on the language. In the other hand if we talk about methodology for teaching, it is proper to use Content Based Instruction because it integrates instruction since this involves an active participation of students with content areas, in other words ,can meet the linguistic and academic needs of learners. So that, language learning would become more motivating and interesting and the improvement of study skills such as note taking, extracting key information or even summarizing texts.

Conclusion

Based on the statistics obtained from the second semester geography course of the University of Cordoba and its professor who provided us with a lot of information about this course. Now we see that we can adapt an approach which helps trainees to improve mainly listening and speaking skills; for this we can take into account the activities that they prefer to be repeated in classes in this case then it would be reading activities that would be used for the purpose of fostering the ability to speak possibly through debates, discussion etc. In addition, students could listen to any reading in English while reading and improve listening skills. Considering the above we could adopt a skill-centered course design and based on a goal-oriented course distinction made by widdowsons (1981) says that "the emphasis in ESP course is not achieving a particular set of goals, but on enabling the learners to achieve what they can within the given constraints. So the material that we need to use has to help to reach the goals and motivate students in the learning process for this course based on the previous interest said before.