Name : Rismawati

NIM : 170220057

Class :B

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF NEED AND WHAT ARE THE PURPOSES OF
NEEDS ANALYSIS ?

A. INTRODUCTION
Need analysis is directed mainly at the goals and content of a course. It examines
what the learners know already and what they need to know. Need analysis make sure
that the course will contain relevant and useful things to learn. Good need analysis
involves asking the right questions and finding the answer in the most effective way.
I would like to write about the types of need and purpose of need analysis,
because I think this part is very interesting to discuss. Why ? because if we talk about
need analysis especially about the types and purpose of need analysis, we can know what
student’s necessities, what their lacks, and also what their wants and what the purpose of
need analysis itself.

B. DISCUSSION
1. Types of Need
The term Needs is not as straightforward as it might appear, and hence the term is
sometimes used to refer wants, desires, demands, expectation, motivations, lacks,
constrains, and requirements. Needs are often described in terms of a linguistic
deficiency, that is, as describing the difference between what a learner can presently do
in a language and what he or she should be able to do.
There are three types of need :
a. Necessities
It’s about what students must know. The first thing to look at in necessities is the
demands of the target tasks. Among the things they will have to do is listen to lectures,
take part in tutorials, write assignments and tasks, and sit exams. If we take
assignments as one example of the things they have to do, we could analyse the kind
of language needed to do an assignment as a way of working out what the learners
would need to know. We could do this by doing a vocabulary analysis of good
assignments, using a program like the Frequency programme or the Range program.
We can also look at past assignment topics to see the kinds of discourse that learners
 would have to handle. We could interview university staff who are involved in setting
and marking such assignments to see what they expect in a good assignment. Perhaps
they are not concerned with the grammatical accuracy of the writing but are more
concerned that the writer writes like a geographer or an economist or a political
scientist. We could also look at the timeframe involved in writing an assignment.

b. Lacks
It’s about what students don’t know from what they already known. An important part
of need analysis involves looking at where learners are at present. One way to
investigate this is to look an assignment or two that learners have just written. The
assignment can be analysed from an information perspective, from a grammar
perspective and from the disource perspective.
Another source of information about lacks could come from the university lecturer
who marks such assignments. This information could be gathered using a think aloud
protocol as the examiner marks the assignment, or it could be gathered by getting the
examiner to reflect on the assignment they have just marked. The learners themselves
are also a very useful source of information about lacks. One way of gathering
information about this is to question the learner about the assignment task usinng a
carefully prepared set of interview questions.
To gather data about the learners’ general proficiency, we can interview them, get
them to sit tests such as vocabulary tests, grammar tests, writing tests aand
comprehension tests, or we can get them to do self-assesment using a specially
prepared checklist.

c. Wants
It’s about what students’ expectations about teaching and learning, about what they
think is useful for them or not. At the very least, information about this is useful in
working out wheter the learners’ views and the need analyst’s views are the same or
not. If we want to know what student wants, we can do observation, we can gather
such information through an interview or a questionnaire. Questionnaires are
notoriously difficult to design well. We could ask the learners what they think will
improve their assignment writing and what they want to be able to do regarding
assignment writing by the end of the English for academic purpose course.
2. The Purposes of Need Analysis
Need analysis is the process of determining the things that are necessary or useful for the
fulfillment of a defensible purpose (Nelson, 1985). Need analysis is relatively new in
language teaching circles. However, needs analysis have been conducted informally for
years by teachers who wanted to acces what language points their students needed to
learn. The purposes of need analysis are :
 To find out what language skills a learner needs in order to perform a particular,
such as sales manager, tour guide, or university students
 To help determine if an existing course adequately addresses the needs of
potential students
 To determine which student from a group are most in need of training in
particular language skills
 To identify a change of direction that people in reference group feel is important
 To identify a gap between what student are able to do and what they need to be
able to do
 To collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing

C. CONCLUSION
The term Needs is not as straightforward as it might appear, and hence the term
is sometimes used to refer wants, desires, demands, expectation, motivations, lacks,
constrains, and requirements. There are three types of need : the first is necessities, it’s
about what students must know. The second is Lacks, it’s about what students don’t know
from what they already known. The third is wants, it’s about what students’ expectations
about teaching and learning, about what they think is useful for them or not.
Actually, the general purpose of need analysis are to collect information about
what stents need in teaching and learning process. We can get the information through
some way, for example through learner self-assesment using lists and sclaes, giving
questionnaires, interviews, meetings, etc.
D. REFERENCES
Brown, James Dean. (1995). Elements of Language Curriculum. Boston USA : Heinle &
Heinle Publishers
Nation, I.S.P and John Macalister. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. New York :
Routledge Taylor and Francis Group
Richards, Jack C. (2001). Curriculum Development in Language Teaching. United States
of America : Cambridge University Press