Needs Analysis Essay – English For Tourism

Needs Analysis Essay- English For Tourism
Needs analysis is the most important part of an ESP course. In fact, one of the main absolute characteristics of ESP, with which some of the most important authors such as Strevens or Dudley-Evans agree, is that ” ESP is

designed to meet specific needs of the learner.” In this paper I aim to stress the importance that a concept such as needs analysis has in a class of English for tourism. However, Esp teachers do not always pay the deserved attention to this feature.

Many students usually expect a needs analysis in a class of ESP such as English for tourism. However, not many teachers feel that such a test is necessary for the course that is going to be taught. Teachers very often rely on already prepared materials to teach the course so they leave aside the students’ needs and the fact that, maybe, those students have some specific wants. If teachers conduct their courses with textbooks, which do not always have the specific contents to achieve the desired goals, the course will end up being a general English class.

Therefore, in a class of English for tourism, a teacher should be able to analyse the target needs and the learning needs, which is something that is very important for the design and development of the course. Depending on the job a student wants to do, the teacher should analyse the target needs because tourism involves a very wide range of jobs such as hotel management or touristic guide. In this case, the student would need certain skills to express his or her knowledge in the target language. From here onwards, the teacher should design an appropriate syllabus taking into account those needs in order to include the activities for the learners to achieve those skills.

However, one of the reasons why teachers do not normally use the needs analysis is that they very rarely have the appropriate knowledge in order to fill in those needs. Due to this, teachers use textbooks which are oriented to the subject of English for tourism, but only in the sense of vocabulary. It is also true that the role of the teacher has some requirements, that is, among others, he or she needs to have a basic knowledge of the main principles of the subject on which the ESP course focuses. In order to pay the right attention to needs analysis the teacher has to be able to solve?? those needs.

As a conclusion, it is very important that an ESP teacher gives the deserved attention to the needs analysis. In order to achieve this, a teacher should use, not only textbooks, but also realia to teach the course. The teacher should also separate those needs into target needs and learning needs depending on the aims of the course and also, the teacher should have some basic notions of the basis?? subject. Teachers should really bear all this in mind so that an ESP course is successful for them and for all the students.