Needs assessment of medical students in ESP courses at Erciyes University

Needs assessment in ESP, as well as in other language teaching programs, plays a central role in curriculum development. Priorities in goals and objectives of a language teaching program are determined on the basis of needs assessment. The principal purpose of this study is to identify the current student-perceived academic needs in the ESP courses in the Erciyes University Medical Faculty. The study is cross-sectional in its nature, surveying each group of the students in the program in order to get an overall picture of their needs and to see how each of the four groups differ from the other three. Two types of research have been conducted to do needs assessment. First, literature on curriculum terminology and three models of course design were reviewed. Second, a descriptive study was done by collecting data from the medical students of Erciyes University concerning their academic needs for their ESP courses. The data were collected using questionnaires which included items about the language skills and language teaching materials, which the students were asked to rank in order of importance, difficulty, and/or appropriateness. There were 76 student subjects in the Medical Faculty of Erciyes University. Each of the four ESP classes was represented by 10% of total number of the students in that class. In analyzing the data, average scores for each item were calculated in order to put the items in order. The overall ranking and the group ranking of the items have been presented in tables. In some cases, the results of the analysis have been presented in percentage. The results of the data analysis revealed three important points: 1. The medical students in Erciyes University feel a need for specialized English. 2. The students consider the receptive language skills, reading and listening, more important than the productive skills, speaking and writing. 3. The student' difficulties in English are due primarily to insufficent knowledge of English sentence structure and technical vocabulary. To overcome their difficulties in English, the students believe that they need more practice in reading, vocabulary and grammar. This study should be of interest to ESP practitioners in Turkish universities who are engaged in needs assessment and other aspects of curriculum development.