Needs Analysis Approaches for Immigration OfficersNguyn Cng MinhHanoi UniversityRunning head: NEEDS ANALYSIS APPROACHES FOR IMMIGRATION OFFICERS 1

AbstractUnderstanding the need of learners in general and ESP learner in particular is a very important stage. Most linguistic researchers agree that needs-analysis should be seen as an indispensable aspect of ESP syllabus design in order to link the present students' academic needs with their needs in their prospective employment. Needs-analysis involves not only the students but also all parties in the educational system and relevant user institutions that ultimately employ students. In this study, the author tries to work out the appropriate approaches to collect the needs of cadets in Border Guard Academy where English for Immigration Procedure Officers at the border gates is becoming an urgent need. He also touch upon essential aspect of needs analysis such as definition, types of needs including target needs and learning need, and approaches to needs analysis.Key words: needs, needs analysis, target needs, learning needs

IntroductionIt is an undeniable fact that needs analysis plays a crucial role in the process of designing and carrying out any language course, whether it is English for Specific Purposes (ESP) or general English course, and its centrality has been acknowledged by several scholars and authors (Munby, 1978; Hutchinson and Waters, 1987; Robinson, 1991; Dudley-Evans and St. John, 1998 etc). According to (1)Hutchinson and Waters (1987, p54) the irreducible minimum of an ESP approach to course design would be needs analysis, since it is the awareness of a target situation a definable need to communicate in English that distinguishes the ESP learner from the learner of General English. Belcher (2006) also attaches importance to the stage of needs-analysis:ESP specialists, therefore, are often needs assessors rst and foremost, then designers and implementers of specialized curricula in response to identied needs. It is probably no exaggeration to say that needs assessment is seen in ESP as the foundation on which all other decisions are, or should be, made. Because of this emphasis on needs, the dividing lines in ESP between researchers and teachers, or curriculum designers, materials developers, and teachers, are frequently blurred."Understanding the importance of carrying out needs-analysis, the author tries to analyze and adapt suitable approaches to work out the needs of cadets in Border Guard Academy where English for Immigration Procedure Officers at the border gates is becoming an urgent need before progressing to other steps in designing a syllabus for the cadets. Due to the limit of scope of a secondary research and time constrains, the author attempts to give out an overview of need-analysis including various approaches to needs-analysis. Basing on the real situation of the target learners, he will choose the appropriate approaches and then make use of some existing model to carry out the needs-analysis stage.

Brief description of the target ESP studentsBorder Guard Academy is a military training institution in which English is a non-major subject. Due to the fact that after graduating most of the cadets do not meet the demand of English when they work in the position of making entry-exit procedures for English speaking foreigners, the Academy decided to add a new course of English for Immigration procedures officers to their training curriculum. This course is designated for second-year cadets who have finished a General English course using the textbook of New Headway Elementary (Liz & John Soars) and some other supporting materials such as Listen Carefully, Course and Effects. These cadets, whose ages are ranging from 19 to 25 years old, are divided in to groups of forty-five to fifty. According to the information given by the Faculty of Basic Science, in the General English course, students have chances to practice all the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. In 10 weeks (140 periods) students are provided with structures and tenses, reading and listening texts and speaking activities through everyday conversations relating to personal information (name, age, job, nationality), hobbies, leisure activities, describing people, comparisons, a working day, past events, and future plans. From the results of the final examination of this course, it can be assumed that the cadets have good demand of grammar and reading, however, are not very good at (even very bad at) listening and speaking skills, and pronunciation. After this course, the cadets continue to study the ESP course which lasts for five weeks (70 periods). However, they have no chances to communicate with foreigners while studying and lack knowledge of culture, customs and habits of foreign people especially those from western countries. The information collected from questionnaires (answered by the cadets) shows that these cadets will work as border officers at the international border gates or sea ports after graduation. At these places, they usually communicate mainly through listening and speaking with foreign passengers (tourists, businessmen, journalist) who are both English native speakers and non-native ones from many different countries all over the world. The topics of the conversations relate to the procedures of entry and exit as well as the procedures of checking passport and involving papers, checking passengers and luggage at border gates. Sometime the topics relate to explaining Vietnamese laws, especially those on Immigration and National Border Sovereignty and Security. The writing skill is also used but very rarely, it is only when someone violates the Laws and the Immigration officers have to handle and make the minutes.Overview of different approaches to need analysisDefinitions of needsConcerning meanings of needs, there are different views of needs which have been paired such as objective versus subjective needs (Richterich, 1980), perceived versus felt needs (Berwick, 1989), goal-oriented and process-oriented (Robinson, 1991). In his book, Robinson (1991) refers to different meanings of needs mentioned by Berwick (1989), Mountford (1981), and Widdowson (1981). According to Berwick (1989), needs are perhaps more appropriately described as objectives (p.57). Widdowson (1981) defines needs as students study or job requirements which refer to what they can do after finishing the language course. Mountford (1981) views that needs may be what the user-institution or society at large regards as necessary or desirable to be learnt from a programme of language instruction (p.27). Meanwhile, Hutchinson and Waters (1987) considered needs as the ability to comprehend and/or produce the linguistic features of the target situation (p.54). They also make a basic distinction between target needs (i.e. what the learners need to do in their target situation) and learning needs (what the learners need to do in order to learn). - Target needsAccording to Hutchinson and Waters (1987), target needs is something of an umbrella term, which in practice hides a number of important distinctions (p55). They also suggest looking at the target situation in term of necessity, lacks and wants. Necessities is a kind of need decided by the requirements of the target situation, that is, the knowledge of language the learners have to know to deal with the target situation. Lacks are the necessities the learners do not have, and wants relate to the students ideas of necessities and their own lacks which may be different from the course designers, sponsors and teachers point of view. (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987)- Learning needsHutchinson and Waters (1987) regarded lacks as the starting point, necessities as the destination, and the learning needs as the route of a journey (ESP course). It meant that learning needs referred to what the students have to do during the course in order to learn. All of these factors must be considered in order to have a useful analysis of learner needs.Approaches to needs analysisIn general, the term of needs analysis refers to the activities involved in collecting information that will serve as the basis for developing a curriculum so that such curriculum will meet the needs of a particular group of students. So far, several approaches to needs analysis have been proposed. Benesch (1996) develops a "critical approach" to needs analysis in the area of writing skill for ESL students in which students are trained to develop their skills to evaluate topics through writing assignments. Her writing course was paired with a psychology class and she considered this class as the target situation because it was the students' major. The assignments for the students were taken from topics discussed in the psychology lectures. Among others, students were assigned either individually or in small groups to review lecture notes, write questions about the psychology lectures for class discussions, rewrite questions for meaning and revision, write research papers on a particular topic discussed in the psychology class.Cunningsworh (1983) uses Van Ek's "Threshold Level" as bases for needs analysis. The specifications of learners' target needs are designed to equip learners to "maintain themselves in most everyday situations, including situations for which they have not been specifically trained" (in Van Ek, 1975). Although specifications of needs cover those situations that adequately serve learner needs at this level, Cunningsworth (1983) comments that they are based on intuition and subjective judgment and that this subjectivity would, in turn, influence the syllabus designer to rely on his subjective judgment.Holec (1980) proposes "self-directed learning" approach to learner needs. This approach is based on the principle that "to teach the learner to learn is to enable him to carry out the various steps which make up the learning process. This "autonomy" of the learner enables appropriate solutions to be found for the problems of differences in the needs... thus, narrowing considerably the gap between what the learner wants to learn and what he does in fact learn" (p.31). Under this approach the learner has the "autonomy" to determine the level of knowledge he wants to achieve, the communicative behavior he believes he will need, the level of competence he wishes to reach, or the objectives he wants to accomplish.Holliday (1995) proposes an ethnographic approach to needs analysis. It involves institutional factors in the process of needs analysis. As a basis of curriculum design, needs analysis will be realistic if there are means for implementing it. In this case, the institution where the analysis is carried out, and the administration staff need to provide supports, access, and resources that are necessary for implementation, such as access to study documents, interviews or visits to offices.The Munby needs analysis approach is adequately summarized in Hawkey (1980). Munby's analysis is a tool for syllabus design which provides a detailed profile of learners and what they need to be able to do after the course or what they need to study during the course. In addition, the analysis also provides a specification of language skills, functions and forms that are required in order to carry out communication types as described in the needs profile.Altman (1980) proposes "learner-centered approach" to analyze the learner needs in language teaching. He recognizes that learners have individual characteristics and differences and that the differences should be ad-dressed accordingly through appropriate instructions. In the learning process, the instruction is designed in such a way to meet individual needs and to allow each individual to develop his or her potentials. This learner-centered language teaching is based on the premise that every learner is uniquely different and that all learners do not learn a foreign language equally well with the same pace. Therefore, learning materials, mode of learning and time allocations are adapted to suit different individual preferences. Altman (1980) provides a table which accommodates learners' differences with eight different patterns of learning arrangements and modifications to meet individual learning needs.The differences in needs analysis approaches are also reconfirmed in the books by Hutchinson & Waters (1987) and Robinson (1991). In his book, Robinson (1991) mentions the two approaches of needs analysis; they are target situation analysis (TSA) and present situation analysis (PSA). According to him, TSA is a kind of needs analysis which put great emphasis on students needs after the language course finished. He also described PSA as a type of needs analysis which pay attention to the students strengths and weaknesses at the beginning of the language course. A combination of TSA and PSA called the language audit was also mentioned by Robinson (1991). Besides the definitions of different approaches to needs analysis stated by Robinson (1991), Hutchinson and Waters (1987) also mentioned the framework of these analyses. According to Hutchinson and Waters (1987) a target situation analysis framework answered the questions of why the language was needed (for study, for work, for training, for a combination of these, or for some other purposes); of how the language would be used in terms of medium, channel, and types of text or discourse; of what the content areas would be in terms of subjects and level; of who the learners would use the language with in terms of native speakers or non-native, level of knowledge of receiver, and relationship. A target situation analysis framework also related to the places where the language would be used in terms of physical setting, human context and linguistic context, and to the time when the language would be used (concurrently with the ESP course or subsequently, frequently, seldom, in small or large amounts).A framework for analysis learning needs was also introduced by Hutchinson and Waters (1987). This framework answered the questions of why the learners were taking the course (compulsory or optional, status, money, promotion involved?, their attitude towards the ESP course); of how the learners learned in terms of their learning background, their concept of teaching and learning, methodology and techniques appealing to them. This framework also referred to available resources such as attitude of teachers to ESP, teachers knowledge of and attitude to the subject content, materials, aids, and chances for out-of-class activities. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) also mentioned the question of who the learners were in terms of age, sex, nationality, English knowledge, subject knowledge, their interests, their socio-cultural background, and their attitude to English or to the cultures of the English speaking world. The learning needs analysis framework included the places where and the time when the ESP course took place.Chosen ApproachesAfter analyzing the approaches to needs analysis approaches with thorough connection with the target students, the author decides to choose a combination of TSA (target situation analysis) and PSA (present situation analysis) to collect information about the needs of his target students. In this part, the author tries to give out some reasons that convince him to choose such approaches.First, using both TSA and PSA will help the author to gather as much as possible the information about the learners and the course. Second, the learners have just finished a general English course; therefore, PSA should be used to collect the information about learners learning background, their strengths and weaknesses as well as their attitude toward the ESP course, methodology in order to adjust the content of the ESP course. Third, TSA should be used to investigate the necessities (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987, p.55) that the border officers at border gate areas are generally aware of in order to function effectively at their locations, which include the situations where they need to function (communicating events), the linguistic features identified in these situations, the language skills required in these situations, and other areas of knowledge (if any) needed to fulfill their duties. Besides, TSA also help to elicit the learners views on and experience associated with these necessities.In conclusion, needs analysis is considered the first step and it plays an important role in designing an ESP course. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the needs of the learners before starting to design an ESP course. Samples of Questionnaire to carry out needs analysisQUESTIONNAIREThe purpose of carrying out this questionnaire is to collect the information about the cadets language background after a GE course and border officers needs in language and communication skills at work. The findings of the questionnaire will be used only for research and educational purposes, so please be as truthful as possible. It will take you no more than 15 minutes to finish. Thanks for your time and support!

SECTION A (For PSA)A1. What do you think about your English skills at the end of the GE course?PLEASE TICKExcellentGoodNot very goodBad

(a)grammar and vocabulary?

(b)reading?

(c) listening?

(d) speaking and pronunciation?

A2. How do you know about the following things?PLEASE TICKMuchNot muchVery littleNothing

(a) some general features of culture of Western countries?

(b) some general features of culture of Eastern countries?

(c) major differences of customs and habits between Western people and Eastern ones?

SECTION B (For TSA)B1. At work, how often do you have chances to communicate with foreigners including:PLEASE TICKAlways Often Sometimes Never

(a) English native speakers?

(b) non-native speakers from Western countries ?

(c) non-native speakers from Eastern countries ?

B2. How often do you use the following English skills at work?PLEASE TICKAlways Often Sometimes Never

(a) listening?

(b) speaking?

(c) reading?

(d) writing?

B3. How often do you use English to undertake the following tasks?PLEASE TICKAlways Often Sometimes Never

(a) checkingforeigners passport

(b) checkingforeigners luggage

(c) controlling procedures of entry and exit of foreigners

NEEDS ANALYSIS APPROACHES FOR IMMIGRATION OFFICERS 1

ReferencesAltman, H. B. (1980), Foreign Language Teaching: Focus on The Learner. In H.B. Altman & C.V. James (eds.), Foreign Language Teaching: Meeting Individual Needs, pp. 1-16. New York: Pergamon Press.Benesch, S (1996), Needs Analysis and Curriculum Development in EAP: An example of a critical approach. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 4, 723-738.Cunningsworth, A. (1983), Needs Analysis - A Review of The State of The Art, System, II, 2. 149-154.Hawkey, R. (1980), Syllabus Design for Specific Purposes. ELT Documents Special. Projects in Materials Design. London: The British Council.Holliday, A. (1995), Assessing Language Needs within An Institutional Context: An Ethnographic Approach. English for Specific Purposes, 14. 2, 115-126.Hutchinson, T., & Waters, A. (1987). English for Specific Purposes:A learning-centred approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Robinson, P.C. (1991). ESP Today: A Practitioners Guide. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd.