A target English needs analysis on ESP course: Exploring medical students’ perceptions of necessities at a Yemeni university

Abstract

This research focuses on the needs analysis and perspectives in evaluating English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses designed for medical students. The study intends to identify the medical students’ perceptions of the frequency and importance of using English language skills. Two different instruments, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, were used to collect data. Respondents included 186 medical students, 4 ESP lecturers, and 10 Department of Medicine (DM) Subject Matter lecturers at Ibb University in Yemen. In this study, quantitative data were collected from three different subject groups (n=200) by means of three versions of the questionnaire. Correspondingly, some follow-up interviews, which were organised with a group of these three informants (n=29), complemented the data collection procedure. The collected data was analysed via the SPSS software package, followed by a qualitative data thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews. The findings showed some differences in which medical students believed the most frequent skills used are Listening and Reading, while their ESP and DM Subject Matter lecturers believed that medical students use Writing and Listening. The results revealed that although most of the English language skills and sub-skills in target needs were considered important or very important by all the participants, there were discrepancies in the preferences and priorities. The findings of this study are expected to be used as reference material for further research and give valuable considerations which may provide useful information for the ESP course designers to meet the target English needs of medical students in Yemen.

Keywords

• esp
• needs analysis
• medical students
• english skills
• inferential statistics