Target Situation Analysis In Munby's Communicative Syllabus Design

3. The scope of needs analysis

With seminal work of Munby’s Communicative Syllabus Design (1978), needs analysis moved towards placing the learner’s purposes in the central position within the framework of needs analysis. According to Jordan (1996) under the umbrella of need analysis, other approaches such as target situation analysis, present situation analysis, deficiency analysis, strategy analysis, and means analysis emerged.

3.1 Target Situation Analysis (TSA)

Needs analysis was established in the mid-1970s (West, 1994). In the earlier periods needs analysis was mainly concerned with linguistic and register analysis, and as Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) suggest, needs were seen as discrete language items of grammar and vocabulary.

Present situation analysis may be posited as a complement to target situation analysis (Robinson, 1991; Jordan, 1997). While target situation analysis tries to establish what the learners are expected to be like at the end of the language course, present situation analysis attempts to identify what they are like at the beginning of it. As Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998, 125) state "a PSA estimates strengths and weaknesses in language, skills, learning experiences." If the destination point to which the students need to get is to be established, first the starting point has to be defined, and this is provided by means of PSA. The term PSA (Present Situation Analysis) was first proposed by Richterich and Chancerel (1980). In this approach the sources of information are the students themselves, the teaching establishment, and the user-institution, e.g. place of work (Jordan, 1997). The PSA can be carried out by means of established placement tests. However, the background information, e.g. years of learning English, level of education, etc. about learners can provide us with enough information about their present abilities which can thus be predicted to some

This tries to establish how the learners wish to learn rather than what they need to learn (West, 1994). All the above-mentioned approaches to needs analysis, TSA, PSA, and to some extent deficiency analysis, have not been concerned with the learners’ views of learning. Allwright who was a pioneer in the field of strategy analysis (West, 1994) started from the students’ perceptions of their needs in their own terms (Jordan, 1997). It is Allwright who makes a distinction between needs(the skills which a student sees as being relevant to himself or herself), wants(those needs on which students put a high priority in the available, limited time), and lacks(the difference between the student’s present competence and the desired competence). His ideas were adopted later by Hutchinson and Waters (1987), who advocate a learning-centered approach in which learners’ learning needs play a vital role. If the analyst, by means of target situation analysis, tries to find out what learners do with language (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987)learning needs analysis will tell us "what the learner needs to do in order to learn" (ibid: 54). Obviously, they advocate a process-oriented approach, not a product- or goal-oriented one. For them ESP is not "a product but an approach to language teaching which is directed by specific and apparent reasons for learning"