Needs Analysis And Accounting English Course Design

Due to the China's accession to WTO and the increasing of economic business transactions with the foreign countries, the importance of English is realized by more and more user-institutions. More and more universities design the Accounting English course for accounting major students in order to meet the requirement of user-institutions, to increase the employment rate of graduates, facilitate the further study of students after their graduation. However, there still exist such doubts as whether the students'needs can be satisfied and whether the knowledge they learned from the course can meet the users' requirements. So far, the researches into this area which have been carried out can not give us a satisfied answer.This paper intends to find out the answers to the previous questions from the perspective of needs analysis, which is the crucial part in the Accounting English course design. In order to get a correct understanding about the real situation of Accounting English course and make a thorough and systematic evaluation of Accounting English course, qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted in the survey. Questionnaires, informal interviews and observations have been used as the useful means of this research. The purpose of this survey is to determine whether the present Accounting English course design can satisfy the learning needs and target needs. Furthermore, the research aims to identify the target needs and learning needs of Accounting English course. From the results of the research, the problems existing in Accounting English course design are identified:first, the structure of course design is too simple to meet the needs of students and society; second, the dull contents and monotonous pattern of materials can not stimulate the students'learning interest; third, the single methodology results in the dull atmosphere of classroom; fourth, the validity of evaluation is poor, and some language skills are ignored.On the basis of the research and the needs analysis of accounting English course, this paper tries to provide an Accounting English course design which relates to the syllabus, materials, methodology and evaluation of it. The author divides the Accounting English course into two stages. The first one is called as the basic stage of AE course. And the second phase is the development stage of AE. The content of the AE course are also divided into two parts:one is English for Basic Accounting; the others are Accounting English Reading and Writing, Accounting English Listening and Speaking, Accounting English Translating. At the basic stage, students must take part in the course of English for Basic Accounting. At the development stage, the student can choose one of the courses from the three courses of the second parts of AE course according to his or her own need and interesting.The eventual purpose of the paper is to hopefully provide some useful suggestions and advices on the Accounting English course. And it is also expected that this paper can offer an effective Accounting English course design, as well as some valuable data.