Needs analysis was one of the most important stages of preparation for writing our course book as it would have an effect on the most important decisions: the themes and the subthemes, objectives, task types, text lengths, assignments and assessment methods. For this reason, in order to make it more efficient and to involve more of our colleagues in the process, we started inviting whoever was interested to become a part of the Needs Analysis Group.
Once we had our volunteers (a group of 6), the group met to brainstorm how to carry out the needs analysis research. The group felt that it was important to gather feedback from both current School of Languages (SL) students and instructors to find out more about their current needs and interests, and also students who are currently studying in their faculties, and faculty members.
Sabancı has an enormous advantage in terms of our ability to carry out such analysis in order to address our students’ future needs. The educational system of the University is based on the Common Foundations Development Year, which all students must complete regardless of their subsequent program choices. During this year, students develop a foundation of knowledge, critical reasoning and an interdisciplinary approach. In other words, all students take the same core courses regardless of their faculties. This allows SL to be able to pinpoint our students' future needs in a more effective way. Please visit http://www.sabanciuniv.edu/en/faculties-programs/foundation for more information on the Foundations Development Year and University Courses for more information on our program. The fact that all students study the same courses for about 2 years limits the scope of the needs of our students in terms of their future studies that we need to address. We can do an analysis of the texts, assignments and materials of a limited number of courses to identify the most immediate needs of all of our students.
Our colleagues worked in two groups, three people in each group. The first group concentrated on the faculty courses and instructors, while the second group worked with previous SL students who are in faculty now, SL instructors, and the current students.
Both groups carried out the analysis through different tools. The first group invited faculty instructors for a meeting to talk about their courses, the profile and the needs of their students. At our meeting, we asked them about the strengths of their students in terms of their language abilities as well as how they coped with different tasks or assessment methods. We also gave them information about our project. The instructors who were not able to join the meeting were contacted by the group members and we received feedback from them as well.
We learned a lot from faculty instructors, and have been trying to reflect the needs they identified in our course book. For example, it was clear that the students found it hard to take notes during long lectures. For this reason, we have increased the number of listening inputs in our new book. We were also able to confirm the importance of our main principles and have decided to keep them. For example, it was clear that the length of the reading and listening texts in our course books should not go down, as coping with the number of pages required in faculty is hard. The instructors also suggested some themes that can be covered in SL so that students can gain some general background knowledge on themes that they will read in more depth in faculty. We also received information about the kinds of assessments. This has helped us to narrow down the genres and task types that we need to introduce to our students. For example, we are slightly re-shaping the type of writing that we teach our students in SL.
The second group conducted surveys, interviews, and some more creative methods, as well. One of our colleagues gave a survey to our current students. The students were also invited to put their names down if they were willing to be contacted for a focus-group meeting. Another colleague had a focus group discussion with SL instructors. The instructors worked in groups to give their ideas on the task types, themes, activities, format, and main principles. The posters prepared by the groups were shared through a Padlet wall, and colleagues who could not be in the discussion group were invited to share their ideas later. Please visit our Padlet wall to see the ideas that were gathered at https://padlet.com/bunyamin/SLNeedsAnalysis
To contact our previous students who are now studying at faculty, SL instructors were asked to share names of students from previous semesters or years, who would most probably be willing to share their ideas. The students were then sent a questionnaire, and a focus-group discussion followed with those who expressed an interest in this by revealing their names at the survey.
Some of the questions that we asked our learners in the survey were as follows:
- What kind of knowledge and skills do you need most in your studies now?
- What are some topics/themes that our students may find interesting and benefit from?
- What are your suggestions to SL teachers for them to prepare the students better for their faculty?
- Generally speaking, how did studying at SL prepare you for your studies?
The findings of the needs analysis groups were shared through presentations and reports. We would like to thank all of our colleagues who allocated extra time to contribute to the book project by undertaking the needs analysis.