Runing Head: NEEDS ANALYSIS RESEARCH

Needs Analysis Proposal on the Needs of English Language and Literature Students:
Melksah University Example
Baki Dusun
Meliksah University

NEEDS ANALYSS RESEARCH

Introduction
Needs analysis in English Language Teaching and English Language related fields has
always been a hot debate in Turkey and it is still one of the top issues of educational discussions.
Although there are many researches on the field, the problems related to the English programs are
still going on. Actually, the main problem that is behind these programs is seen as the lack of
needs analysis. Therefore, this study will mainly focus on a specific example that is Meliksah
University English Language and Literature Program. The aim of this paper is to propose a
model for analyzing the needs of the program.

Method
To assess the needs of the program, I used Browns (1995) taxonomy. A student
questionnaire has been administered to the students and the other stakeholders, families and
teachers have been interviewed. The target groups is the first year ELL students, the audience are
teachers and parents. In the first step, as an internal observer, I did not use an outsider but in the
following step of developing this needs analysis can be hiring an external expert to make
observations and comment on the program. Point of view of the analysis is that objective versus
subjective needs because this investigation will give away the basic needs of the students
according to the observations, however, parents and teachers may also talk about the subjective
needs like the should be situations. Therefore, the needs analyst will follow a balance between
these two dichotomies.

Procedure

NEEDS ANALYSS RESEARCH

The most difficult part for me was to define what students really need to learn? We
already had fourteen different courses in two semesters but were those courses meet the
requirements of the students needs? Except for the students needs, even though they are the
main focus point in the program, I needed to include all the stakeholders ideas about the program
to have a holistic point of view to finalize the needs analysis. Therefore I used a democratic
philosophy to find out the needs and with bearing these questions in mind, I did three different
needs analysis study with students, teachers and families. In these studies I tried to find out what
they really expect from this program. For quantitative data collection, I did a survey with the
students. For qualitative data collection, I did interviews with the teachers and families. In the
interviews, my main target was to gather qualitative data and get the ideas of the participants with
their own sentences except for the numbers that I got from the questionnaires. One of the
limitations of this study is that I was not able to do interviews with the students because of the
time restriction and number of the students.

Participants / Stakeholders
In this study, I had 25 students, 7 teachers and 10 families. I included all the students from
the first year and the whole staff who were related to the first year. With the families, I randomly
selected 10 parents to avoid any bias or predetermined decisions. I could not include all the
families because of the fact that some of them were out of Kayseri.
Data Analysis
For quantitative data came from questionnaires, I used frequencies and means according
to the scores. For qualitative data, I coded the interviews and quote the important parts of the
interviews.