Curriculum Design For Business English Students Based On Needs Analysis Theory

As one of the most important branches of ESP (English for Specific Purposes), Business English has nearly sixty years'history in China. After years of research, a battery of objectives of Business English teaching have pinned down by scholars and educators, aiming to equip students with a solid foundation of application-oriented knowledge and skills in both English and business. Such goals have been endorsed by the Ministry of Education, which was highlighted in 2009 in the release of"National Curriculum for BA Program in Business English"(hereafter called National Curriculum), a curriculum design guideline for all colleges and universities in China. However, one important question remains to be addressed: Does the exiting curriculum design framework meet the demand of this fast-changing society?Needs analysis is a widely used tool to study the validity and relevancy of all curriculum design activities. It assures a flexible curriculum responsive to the needs of various stakeholders of education.Thus, under the guidance of needs analysis theory, this research attempts to evaluate the validity of existing Business English curriculum of Shandong Jiaotong University (hereafter called SDJTU) by identifying and analyzing the needs of Business English undergraduates, graduates as well as their employers and Business English teachers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used. In this study, 62 undergraduates, 52 graduates and 41 Business English teachers were interviewed with structured questionnaires designed specifically for each group. Additionally, 10 in-depth interviews were conducted with the employers. Results indicate that most of participants of the four groups believe the allocation of teaching hours to each module in the current National Curriculum is appropriately designed. Both undergraduates and graduates prefer textbooks in English written by foreign scholars and like their Business English classes taught in English but with some explanations in Chinese for the incomprehensible texts. For graduates, email writing is the most frequent among all business activities; those who are in the positions of sourcing and sales have more opportunities to use English in their working settings than translators and assistants.In addition, a four-year longitude study on the improvement of English proficiency was conducted among Business English students and traditional English majors. TEM-4 and TEM-8 were used to benchmark the change of English proficiency. Results of independent samples t-test indicate that students of Business English and traditional English majors show no significant differences in their improvement of English proficiency, thus confirming the hypothesis of this research that teaching business knowledge and skills in English does not affect language learning.These results, though gained from the case study on one university, may shed light on the evaluation and improvement of the Business English curriculum design of other universities of same academic level.