The Utility of Needs Analysis for Nondomain Expert Instructors in Designing Task-Based Spanish for the Professions Curricula

Abstract

The demand for Spanish for specific purposes (SSP) university courses in the United States has prompted widespread curricular change in language departments over the last two decades (Klee, 2015; Sánchez-López, 2013). However, many instructors lack the tools and training needed to design SSP curricula that meet learners' communicative needs in such contexts. Moreover, little SSP research to date has taken a task-based approach to identifying learners' specialized needs (Long, 2015), which can provide much-needed support to instructors who are nonexperts in the particular domain of interest. The current study reports on a small-scale, multiphase needs analysis carried out to design a university business Spanish course. In Phase 1, a small sample of business graduates and professionals generated a list of 40 target tasks in the domains of reading, writing, listening, and speaking that were relevant to their particular work. In Phase 2, 54 university business majors rated the frequency and difficulty of each task on a 40-item Likert-type questionnaire. During Phase 3, the researchers analyzed and grouped target tasks identified in the needs assessment to create five major target task types that informed course objectives and classroom tasks. Video Abstract and Discussion