Running head: ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN

Adult Survival ESL Needs assessment Plan Stephen McClure & Naum Neskoski LING 583 Curriculum and Materials Design for TESOL Professor Xuehua Xiang University of Illinois at Chicago

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN Introduction Needs assessment should be an ongoing, cyclical activity that continually provides the teacher with information about students' needs (Graves, 2000, p. 98). This needs assessment plan is based on the context defined in our previous paper, "Issues in Adult Survival ESL Course Design." The primary factor guiding us in designing or selecting needs analysis instruments is the purpose of the course, in this case: providing students with basic English "survival" skills they

need to conduct their everyday lives. We will not attempt here to define all the needs assessment instruments we believe are necessary for this type of course. Rather, we will focus on two kinds of needs assessment we think are crucial at the onset of such a course. The first instrument focuses on students' subjective needs, such as the language skills they wish to focus on and the purposes for which they are studying English. The second is geared toward assessing the learners' objective needs, in terms of their proficiency level and literacy (Brown, 2007, pp. 152-153). Here we will attempt to assess their degree of familiarity with English orthography (recall that some recent immigrants may not be familiar with the Roman alphabet, while others will). These two assessment techniques are described below, along with a discussion of their respective benefits and limitations.

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN Online/Paper Take-Home Survey Given our survival English context, we can make the following assumptions: (1) at least some of the students enrolled in the course will not have access to a computer to be able to complete an online survey, and (2) at least some

will not have enough knowledge of English to fill out a survey form. In line with these assumptions, we have developed a pictorial survey that can be completed online or on paper. A paper copy will be handed out to everyone during the first class session. Students will be encouraged to refer to the URL on the sheet and submit the survey online. The results will indirectly give us an idea of what proportion of the class is computer-literate and/or has access to a computer. This information will help us determine the extent to which we will be able use technology for language learning during the course of the program. The online/take-home survey will be given out during the first class session, to determine the students interests and priorities in taking the course. Since we are assuming that at the low-beginner level, students have limited English skills, the survey items will consist of familiar visual cues in the form of images, in addition to a one or two word textual description. The survey has two sections: one asks how important each of the four language macroskills is to the

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN student, the other asks them to rate the importance of nine social situations in which they may need to use English.

Although the vocabulary that corresponds to the images will be presented in class, no knowledge of English is required to complete the survey. The images we adapted for this instrument come from a widely used survey intended for low-beginner proficiency levels, developed by the Los Angeles Unified School District's Division of Adult and Career Education (LAUSD, 2008, p. 153). It includes images depicting shopping, social conversation, transportation and maps, forms and tests, etc. In the original paper-based version, students are asked to choose only three of the nine available situations/social skills and only two language macroskills. We restructured the survey so that students can express how important each of these features is on a scale from one to five. In case the students are unfamiliar with such rating scales, we created two iconic images with a 5 next to a thumbs up symbol on a green background, and a 1 next to a thumbs down symbol on a red background. We did not exclude any of the images from the original source, because we deemed them all important for learners in a survival English course. The main benefit of using such an instrument are that even students with little or no knowledge of English can

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN understand and respond to the survey. The most obvious limitation is that it depicts only 9 social situations, while learners may have interests and needs in many other areas. We

will attempt to overcome this limitation using our second, inclass assessment activity. In-Class Dual-Purpose Activity The second type of needs assessment instrument we plan to use is both a classroom activity and an assessment tool. By conducting this activity, the teacher will gain first-hand knowledge of the proficiency levels and linguistic needs of individual students, and the class may reap other benefits as well. The activity picks up where the pictorial survey left off, during the next class session. Using the images on the pictorial survey handout, the teacher describes a hypothetical student (perhaps using another picture on a screen or board), and goes around the classroom asking each student to say which of the language skills and social situations this hypothetical student is interested in. The teacher attempts to elicit both spoken and written responses from each student (about the hypothetical student). The teacher keeps a tally on the board of what the students respond. This could be done several times for several hypothetical people. This provides ample opportunity for high quality input from the teacher, and much

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN reinforcement and practice of the relevant vocabulary. Next, the teacher asks the students themselves to articulate and write down their own preferences and interests. Learners are usually more willing to talk about themselves in a group when they move from the impersonal (the hypothetical students) to the personal (Auerbach, 1994). The observations of students during this exercise, and their written responses, will give the teacher valuable, specific information regarding individual students' objective language learning needs.

The benefits of such an activity are that it requires few resources to implement (recall that few are generally available in the community center context), and that it can be easily repeated periodically to check students' progress. This is also an opportunity for the teacher (and the students!) to introduce other social situations that were not in the survey. It not only provides information about students' objective needs, but can also reveal more subjective needs. Furthermore, the activity serves to introduce the students to each other, and thus helps build the relationships that will be so important for them throughout the course. A possible limitation is that some students may not yet have enough language skills to fully participate in the activity (but that fact is in itself also evidence of their needs).

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN Conclusion Adult survival English curricula are generally organized based on topics similar to the social situations depicted in our online/paper survey instrument. This is the case with our

community center context, which uses a textbook (Fuchs et al., 2010) that includes, for example, work, transportation, and shopping as unit topics. The information we would glean from using these two needs assessment instruments at the beginning of our course would give us exactly the kind of information we need to modify our planned syllabus to align with the needs of this particular group of students. We would use the subjective results to decide the order, emphasis, and inclusion/exclusion of topic-based units, as well as to identify topic areas where we need to bring in other materials. The objective results would show us which students need extra help with orthography or level zero English, in order to quickly get the entire class roughy to the same proficiency level, and would also give us clues as to how to sequence linguistic topics. As the program progressed, we would periodically repeat the impersonal to personal round robin discussion activity (as well as other needs assessment techniques), to continually reassess the needs of our students.

ADULT SURVIVAL ESL NEEDS ASSESSMENT PLAN References Auerbach, E. (1994). Making meaning, making change: Participatory curriculum development for adult ESL literacy. Washington, DC and McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems. Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (3rd Ed.). White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman. Fuchs, M., Johnson, L., Lynn, S., & Schoenberg, I. (2010). Future: English for results 1. White Plains, NY: Pearson Longman. Graves, K. (2000). Designing language courses: A guide for teachers. Boston, MA: Heinle. Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). (2008, March 8). General format. Retrieved from: http://esl.adult-

instruction.org/documents/50-01-51ESLBegLowrevsept08.pdf.