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.

Business Spanish in the Real World: A Task-Based Needs Analysis

“…Different definitions of tasks have been proposed in the literature: tasks as problemposing activities (Candlin, 1987); tasks as vehicles to raise learners' awareness of the functional use of a linguistic form (Norris, 2011); tasks as those things that people do in their everyday lives (Long, 1985). Long's definition, as Serafini and Torres (2015) point out, is construed independently of the language needed to realize it and seems particularly suitable for professional contexts (e.g., a work meeting, job interview, etc.) for this reason.…”

“…Another challenge in the field is that non-expert instructors lack training to appropriately implement their SSP courses (Serafini & Torres, 2015). When instructors receive minimal guidance in how to teach LSP courses, the consequences for students, especially those with weaker language skills, can be devastating (Klee & Tedick, 1997;Lynch, Klee, & Tedick, 2001).…”

“…The present study aims to contribute to this area of research by revisiting and replicating Serafini and Torres (2015). Specifically, the current study added some methodological improvements to Serafini and Torres' design (i.e., open-ended interviews in Phase 1, larger sample size in Phase 2, and an interaction of sources and methods).…”

“…As a result, instructors of SSP working within a task-based framework are faced with an overall shortage of available materials. In a recent study, Serafini and Torres (2015) tried to fill this gap. They identified the most important tasks for business graduates and professionals and then asked business majors to rate the difficulty and frequency of these tasks, in order for the authors to group them in different "task types" for pedagogical purposes.…”

“…When focusing on SSP in general, we find examples in disciplines other than business (Lear, 2006;Lepetit & Cichocki, 2002;Mason, 1992), though only a few focus on business Spanish (Buendía Cambronero, 2013; Doyle, 2010;García-Romeu, 2006;Prieto Ramos, 2000), and only one adopts a task-based perspective (Serafini & Torres, 2015). However, none of the business Spanish NAs accounted for a genuine source-method interaction, as data from the same source were not triangulated via different methods, nor was the same method used to triangulate data from different sources.…”