Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Overview
The notion of needs assessment brings the idea of planning;
it identifies learners’ need to achieve the goal of teaching. A teacher gives
an opportunity for student to decide classroom activities and materials based
on their needs—what they already learnt and want to learn. Thus, it is not a
merely teacher who has an authority to select the whole processes of learning,
but also the students. Furthermore, this idea is also in line with Gardener’s
belief on multiple intelligences; it is an attempt to accommodate the learners’
learning style.
The needs assessment will result positively when it is
applied practically using assessment tool such as surveys, questionnaires,
interviews, exams, discussions, etc. There is no superior tool than the others,
it is applied based on teachers’ purposes and multiple tool can be used. In
addition, its outcome is valuable to redesign the well-established curriculum; accordingly
it gives a clear guidance for teacher to set classroom conducts and the
teaching itself become more flexible and practical for student.
List of Implication for further teaching
After reading this article, I have a sort of thought that needs
assessment is a fundamental aspect of constructing curriculum or ideas to teach
English for Specific Purposes (ESP). In my previous ESP teaching, I did not do
a well-structured need analysis as it is suggested in the article—I did it
randomly by only asking the student what they want to learn and some materials
are indeed stated in the fixed-curriculum. Furthermore, I have an idea of designing
some instruments or assessment tools to implement the way needs assessment
works so that I know how to read the data and will follow them up by
structuring good teaching materials and actions which is practical for my
students.
Response
Beside its importance of conducting need analysis, in my opinion,
this idea will not work well on students who do not have eager in learning
activities. They do not know what they want to study and seem do not care about
learning, it is not a positive one. In this context, a teacher must take
his/her role to decide the teaching.
Question
·
How
to divide the teaching material or activity based on the data we have? Should
we prioritize the majority student other than the minority one?
· When
is needs assessment best conducted? Is it in the beginning of every academic
year/semester?