NEEDS ANALYSIS AND THE ARAB LEARNERS Ahmad Kandil, MLI, UAE

Abstract The subject of needs analysis (NA) has not yet received sufficient attention from researchers and language teaching professionals in the Arab world. As a result, Arab learners rarely have input in their language teaching context. This paper is an attempt to shed some light on this subject by offering a generic and critical reflection on some of the NA-related educational ailments that are ubiquitous in the Arab world. The focus is on the students of the general secondary stage in the governmental schools. A great deal of care has been taken to strike a balance between theory and practice.

Introduction The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on needs analysis (NA), or rather lack thereof, in the Arab world. The focus of the paper is on the general secondary stage (GSS) in the governmental schools (i.e. high school students in the American system), a stage that has a lot of similarities among the various Arab states. I will begin with a brief theoretical introduction about the concept of needs analysis and present two NA taxonomies that, if implemented, should provide English language instructors with a well-rounded idea about their learners' needs. Then, I will draw on my life-long experience in the Arab world both as a language teaching professional and an ex-student in order to provide a generic and critical examination of NA in the Arab world. Finally, I will present some recommendations that may help educators and other interested parties to improve the process of foreign language instruction vis-?-vis Arab learners' needs.

Needs Analysis (NA) Richards, Platt J., and Platt H. (1992, pp. 242 & 243) state that NA is 'the process of determining the needs for which a learner or group of learners requires a language and arranging the needs according to priorities'. In doing this, they illustrate, needs analysts gather subjective and objective information about the learner in order to know the objectives for which the language is needed, the situation in which the language will be used, with whom the language will be used, and the level of proficiency required. In another definition of needs analysis, Nunan (1988, p. 13) focuses more on the information-gathering process; he states that "techniques and procedures for collecting information to be used in syllabus design are referred to as needs analysis". Before proceeding further, it is noteworthy to mention that 'needs analysis' and 'needs assessment' are used interchangeably. Nevertheless, 'needs analysis' is the term used throughout this paper, as it implies in the author`s point of view - deeper thought and reflection than simply knowing or extracting learners' needs.

The subject of NA started to gain prominence in the west during the last two decades of the twentieth century, more specifically, with Munby`s (1978) classification of communicative needs. Researchers have realized that it is not practical to attempt to teach the whole of a foreign language, as this will require more time and effort than is practically possible for the majority of learners and teachers alike (Maley, 1983). It has been argued that even native speakers of the language do not use all their information about their first language (L1), and that much of this information is used passively, i.e. at the recognition level only. Accordingly, focusing on the reasons why learners need to learn the foreign language will better enable language teaching professionals to cater for their learners' specific needs and save a lot of wasted time and effort. The seminal work of Munby (1978) has led researchers, especially in the field of English for special/specific purposes (ESP), to propose various NA taxonomies and suggest various ways in which students' needs may be analyzed (e.g., Benesch, 1996; Ferris, 1998; Harowitz, 1986; Hutchinson & Waters, 1984, 1987; Johns, 1981; Seedhouse, 1995; Tudor, 1993; West, 1994). Unfortunately, NA in the Arab world has not yet received sufficient attention. Students' needs are rarely, if ever, analyzed; they are rather intuited for them (Johns, 1991). This particular point will be tackled later in this paper.

According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), needs analysis started mainly in the field of ESP. Nevertheless, they argue that as far as needs analysis is concerned, there should not be any difference between ESP and general English (GE). They state that:

It is often argued that the needs of the general English learner, for example the schoolchild, are not specifiable. . . . In fact, this is the weakest of all arguments, because it is always possible to specify needs, even if it is only the need to pass the exam at the end of the school year. There is always an identifiable need of some sort. What distinguishes ESP from General English is not the existence of a need as such but rather an awareness of the need. (Hutchinson & Waters 1987, p. 53)

Similarly, Richards (1990, as cited in West, 1994, p. 13) believes that "most of the literature on needs analysis originally came from the realm of TESP but needs analysis procedures have increasingly come to be seen as fundamental to the planning of general language courses". In order to practically support this argument, Seedhouse (1995) presented an example of how NA procedures could be implemented in the GE classroom. These procedures enabled the researcher to improve the language teaching curriculum so as to fulfil his students' psychosocial needs, something that is much more sophisticated than providing students with a certain set of lexical items or grammatical structures. Consequently, it seems plausible to argue that any course should be based on an NA of the learners, as this is how the procedures of ESP could be beneficial to general English. This argument serves as a focal point for the purpose of this article. In the subsequent part of this paper, I will briefly introduce two NA taxonomies that should give the readers an idea of how NA has been approached and delineated by various researchers.

NA Taxonomies

Under the general heading of need, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) identify the following divisions: 1) Target Needs: they believe that 'target needs' is an umbrella term that hides a number of important distinctions. They look at the target situation in terms of necessities, lacks and wants as following: a) Necessities: i.e. "the type of need determined by the demands of the target situation, that is, what the learner has to know in order to function effectively in the target situation " (p. 55). b) Lacks: the authors believe that identifying necessities alone is not enough and that we also need to know what the learner knows already, as this helps us decide which of the necessities the learner lacks. In other words, we need to match the target proficiency against the existing proficiency, and the gap between them is the learner`s lacks. c) Wants: learners' wants and their views about the reasons why they need language should not be ignored, as students may have a clear idea about the necessities of the target situation and will certainly have a view as to their lacks. Actually, this might be a problem as the learner`s views might conflict with the perceptions of other interested parties, e.g. course designers, sponsors, and teachers.

2) Learning Needs: Learning needs explain how students will be able to move from the starting point (lacks) to the destination (necessities). Hutchinson and Waters (1987) claim that it is naive to base a course design simply on the target objectives, and that the learning situation must also be taken into account. They add that the target situation alone is not a reliable indicator, and that the conditions of the learning situation, the learners' knowledge, skills, strategies, and motivation for learning are of prime importance. Figure 1 below illustrates this taxonomy.

The authors then offer a target situation analysis framework that consists primarily of the following questions: why is the language needed? How will the language be used? What will the content areas be? Who will the learner use the language with? Where will the language be used? When will the language be used? They also offer a similar framework for analyzing learning needs that comprises the following questions: why are the learners taking the course? How do the learners learn? What resources are available? Who are the learners? Where will the course take place? When will the course take place? Finally, the writers offer various ways for gathering information about the target needs such as: questionnaires, interviews, observations, data collection, and informal consultations with sponsors, learners and others.

Starting from Hutchinson and Waters? (1987) classification of needs analysis, West (1994) propounds the following delineation:

1) Target situation analysis: it identifies the 'necessities', i.e. the demands of the target situation or, in other words, what the learners need to know in order to function effectively in the target situation. 2) Deficiency analysis: it is, as mentioned earlier, the gap between what the target trainees know at present and what they are required to know or do at the end of the program. Other aspects of deficiency analysis investigate whether students are required to do something in the target language that they cannot do in their native language. 3) Strategy analysis: it mainly identifies the learners? preferred learning styles. Obviously the focus here is on methodology, but there are other related areas such as: reading in and out of class, grouping size, doing homework, learning habits, correction preferences, etc. 4) Means analysis: it is mainly concerned with the logistics, practicalities, and constraints of needsbased language courses. West (1994) points out that some analysts believe that instead of focusing on constraints, it might be better if course designers think about how to implement plans in the local situation. 5) Language audits: this basically includes 'any large-scale exercise forming the basis of strategic decisions on language needs and training requirements carried out by or for: 1) individual companies, 2) professional sectors, 3) countries or regions' (West 1994, p. 12). West indicates that language audits may simply be used to identify and describe the current state of language teaching. Nevertheless, they may also be used to help a certain country or organization to formulate a new strategy based on the clients' needs that may take months or even years to implement.

Finally, a good point regarding NA has been stated by Benesch (1996). She distinguishes between descriptive needs analysis (DNA) and critical needs analysis (CNA). DNA is mainly concerned with the description of the target situation so as to function as a basis for curriculum design and/or curriculum development. In DNA, thus, no attempt is made in order to change the status quo, and students are trained within the current state in order to fulfil the demands of the target situation. CNA, on the other hand, attempts to find ways that may modify the existing conditions and, consequently, aspire to change the target situation. Benesch (1996) states that the majority of NA in the fields of ESP/EAP is mainly descriptive. Another distinction has been endeavored by Sysoyev (2000) who prefers the term `students analysis' to 'needs analysis'. He states that the former does not only inform us of students' needs but it also acquaints us with other equally important factors such as: students' motivation, learning styles, field knowledge in the native/foreign language, etc.

So far, I have presented various definitions and classifications of NA. This has been intended to be a theoretical overture before illustrating how this information applies to the Arab learners.

Needs Analysis vis-?-vis the Arab learners

A critical examination of English language instruction in the governmental schools of the Arab world reveals that NA is virtually non-existent. Students needs are simply intuited for them, rather than analyzed or assessed. First of all, the target situation analysis is not applicable because the target situation is unknown to the students and educators alike. Students' future depends solely on the scores that they get in the state-wide Thanaweyya Amma (TA) test [a.k.a. the General Secondary School Test] which students take at the end of their secondary (high-school) stage and whose scores determine in which university/college students can pursue their education. In other words, students do not know if they will end up studying medicine, law, military sciences, commerce etc. until they check their TA test scores against the minimum score required for their favorite college. This has had a great impact on English language instruction at the high-school level. Preparing students linguistically to be medical doctors is not the same as preparing them to be accountants, army officers, or flight attendants. As a result, teachers of English in the Arab world have been implementing what Medgyes (1986) calls TENOR (Teaching English for No Obvious Reasons).

The fact that the target situation is unknown has weakened the other subsequent components in the various NA dichotomies. Taking West`s (1994) delineation, for example, we immediately realize that deficiency analysis is unspecifiable as long as the target situation is unknown. In other words, if students do not know what language they need in order to function effectively in the target situation, foreign language instructors cannot measure the gap between what students know at present and what they are required to know at the end of the program/school year.

Arguing that NA is only related to ESP and that it is not possible to specify these needs in the general English class is a weak argument that has been discussed earlier in this paper. Besides, the fact that English has become the medium of instruction in several Arab colleges/departments necessitates that a large number of students in secondary/high schools need to study EAP (English for Academic Purposes) before embarking on their university studies. EAP is by definition a sub-category of ESP (Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1991).

Some readers may argue that the general secondary/high-school students at the governmental schools do not study ESP courses, and that they are simply required to increase their general English language proficiency up to a level that enables them to continue their education at the university level. This, in the writer`s viewpoint, cannot be a legitimate target in the absence of any standardized language proficiency test that determines the general English proficiency level of the secondary/high school graduates. Accordingly, there are no criteria that can guarantee that a score of 40 on the TA test four years ago, for example, is equal to the same score on the TA test this year. Actually, it`s not unusual to read in the newspapers that students across the nation in one Arab country complain about the difficulty of the English test in a particular year, whereas students in the previous year(s) have either not raised such a complaint or probably have given favorable feedback regarding the difficulty of the test. The fact that students' future studies and careers are largely, if not exclusively, dependent on the overall score that they get at the TA test advocates the use of standardized tests.

Another disadvantage that Arab students encounter is the absence of transitional language courses that prepare the secondary/high-school graduates for study at the university. This does not happen at the school level, nor does it happen in the majority of colleges and universities. As a result, freshmen in the majority of the Arab universities are caught between the weak, or rather unsuitable, language instruction that they received at school and the high demands and expectations of their university professors. Having gone through this system, I and the majority of my colleagues have experienced a severe initial shock at university. All of a sudden we had to jump from the unguided general English language instruction at school to studying the sixteenth and seventeenth century British literature that was, and still is, an integral component of the curriculum of the English department at the college where I got my BA. My ex-classmates in high school who ended up in other universities experienced similar shocks in their respective colleges. Up till now, no substantial changes that I know of have happened to this dilemma. Preparatory linguistic courses are not taught at the school level, and they are implemented only by few Arab colleges.

Some readers may argue that it is not possible to conduct NA for such a large number of students. Students after all have different needs, and it is impossible to design a language curriculum that may match all these various needs across the nation. Again, how can we be sure that students will specify their needs rather than their wants? Actually, these are two valid concerns that will be handled in the 'recommendations' section of this paper, more specifically in the third, fourth and fifth points.

The advent of the Communicative Approach (CA), moreover, has further aggravated the situation of foreign language instruction in the Arab world. In the absence of any NA, students have been treated as if they were all going to live in the West, more specifically the US or UK where the sweeping majority of pre-packaged curricula are imported. Whereas communication is by definition mutual between two or more participants, the greater number of these imported 'communicative' curricula create a learning environment that is conducive to one-way communication from the socio-cultural perspective. In other words, students are inundated with information about the 'target culture' without being linguistically capable of expressing the particularities of their own culture, which are not usually part of the imported curriculum (e.g., lexical items, cultural topics, local interests etc.) Just by way of example, local students in the UAE (and unsurprisingly other Gulf states) have expressed their astonishment that a rainy day is negatively referred to in the imported text as a bad/terrible/horrible day.

In addition, a lot of attention has been given to verbal communication at the expense of other forms of communication, e.g., writing and other related sub-skills such as keyboard skills. Arab teachers of English have been suddenly asked to become something which they are not and can never be, i.e. become native speakers of the language. As a result, native speakers of the language have been imported in several Arab countries, together with the language teaching curricula. All these complications are happening while - for purely pragmatic purposes - the genuine objective of the

students is to pass their TA test and achieve a high score that entitles them to join their favorite course of study. This contradiction between the means and the objectives has created a lot of pressure on teachers and students alike. The absence of NA at the macro and micro levels, i.e. at the state and class/school levels respectively, has been one reason for such confusion.

This has been a generic analysis of the foreign language instruction in the general secondary education in the Arab world. The picture is evidently teeming with a lot of contradictions and complexities. In order to mitigate the ensuing pressure on teachers and students, some decisions have to be made both at the macro and micro levels of the several educational organizations. Below are some recommendations that my hopefully alleviate the severity of the above-drawn image.

Recommendations: First of all, if the purpose of foreign language instruction in the general secondary stage of the government schools is to raise the general English language proficiency level of the learners, the nation-wide test that students take at the end of their high-school stage should be a standardized test. This is a very important factor to ensure that all students have equal chances to joining the university of their choices, and it can also be a guarantee against grade inflation that has become a characteristic of some Arab states. Otherwise, students should have a fair amount of input into their language learning process so as to be able to choose among the language teaching curricula, methods, etc. that best cater for their needs.

Second, students should study a specific ESP/EAP course at the beginning of their university studies that is specifically designed to prepare the undergraduates to conduct their work-related tasks with a great deal of efficiency. The fact that English has become the language of international communication and is very indispensable for professional development underscores the importance of such ESP/EAP undergraduate courses. Such courses, furthermore, become increasingly important if the only language instruction that the government schools provide is general English. Universities, on their part, should periodically conduct a wide-range NA that includes the university`s undergraduates, graduates, professors, and any other relevant parties. This should provide the various universities, colleges, and departments with a more accurate idea about their learners' needs as envisaged by the incoming students and as experienced by the university`s graduates.

Third, governments should regularly conduct language audits that involve a large number of students, teachers, administrators, supervisors, researchers, and any other interested parties. Such a large-scale NA should be able to better inform decision makers of the particular needs of students in the governmental schools. If it is practically difficult to cater for the various needs of such a large number of students, such language audits will at least enable officials to choose/design the language teaching materials that best meet students' general needs. This is believed to be more expedient than importing commercial language teaching series that are supposed to be taught all over the

world regardless of students' actual needs, preferred learning strategies, local language learning environment, etc.

Fourth, teachers should be able to supplement the above-mentioned large-scale language audits in realizing their students' specific needs. This means that teachers should conduct their own NA with each group of learners so as to be able to provide for the group`s specific needs. The two recommendations mentioned in the third and fourth points may warrant that students? various needs are analyzed and - as much as possible - catered for at the macro and micro levels. A corollary of that argument is that the language teaching curricula prescribed by the Arab ministries of education should be less dense so as to enable teachers to design their own (or develop the existing) language teaching materials that would match their students' specific needs. As Gatehouse (2001) states, teachers should not be asked to design or develop their own language teaching materials without having the ample time to do so. Another corollary is that foreign language instructors should in the first place be very well-trained to conduct NA and design/develop their own language teaching materials. This should be a very rudimentary skill for pre-service teachers to learn and for in-service teachers to develop and improve.

Fifth, study skills should be a principal subject to be studied by all Arab learners throughout the various educational stages, i.e. primary, preparatory, secondary, and university education. Study skills should better enable language learners to equip themselves with their own language needs and prepare themselves for their future professions. The fact that teaching the whole of a foreign language is almost impossible underlies the importance of study skills for the students so as to become successful, life-long, autonomous learners. The onus of providing for the learners' needs thus should not only be on teachers and government officials but on the students themselves as well. Learners with good study skills are also more capable of providing constructive feedback regarding their language needs and preferred learning strategies. They will most probably have the ability to distinguish between their needs and their wants. Study skills, furthermore, could be an intrinsically important factor that may solve the conflict between students' needs and the course requirements. Students with good study skills will be well equipped to make up for any weaknesses (that may happen as a result of this conflict) in their language teaching programs.

Conclusion: This paper has been an attempt to draw the attention of educators, language teaching professionals, and other interested parties to the dilemma of a large number of the Arab students in the GSS of the governmental schools. Students are not adequately prepared, from a linguistic point of view, to pursue their university education with a great deal of efficiency. The core of the problem lies in the commercial, pre-packaged language teaching curricula that are usually imported for the students and are not based on their needs. This is too large a subject to be covered in depth within the scope of this paper. The fact that English has actually become the language of instruction in many Arab colleges/departments and the leading role that the English language is increasingly assuming all over

the world entail that secondary/high school students in this part of the world be better prepared for their university studies. The Arab world is in need of extensive research about the subject of NA in each single Arab country. More research is needed in order for us to be able to identify and cater for students' needs in the various stages (i.e., primary, preparatory, secondary, and university). Research is also needed throughout the various educational systems in the Arab world (i.e. general education, technical education, agricultural education, etc.) where students' needs are almost always intuited rather than analyzed. It is hoped that the dismal picture that is drawn in this article will invite researchers to pay the subject of NA the attention it deserves in the Arab world.

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Sysoyev, P. V. (2000). Developing an English for specific purposes course using a learner centered approach: A Russian experience. The Internet TESL Journal, VI (3). Retrieved June 28, 2002, from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Sysoyev-ESP.html Tudor, I. (1993). Teacher roles in the learner-centred classroom. ELT Journal, 47 (1), 22-31. West, R. (1994). Needs analysis in language teaching. Language Teaching, 27, 1-19.

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