A Survey Of Learner Needs For Public Business Administration English Curriculum Design

With the development of globalization and expansion of economic and technologiccommunication among countries, in order to keep the competitive power, China isdemonstrating a growing demand for the talents, who should not only possess the expertiseknowledge necessary for their specialists, but also have a good command of Englishlanguage.To prepare China’s graduates to meet the needs of social and technology development,increasing numbers of colleges and universities are setting ESP (English for Specific Purpose)curriculum for the special requirement of the talents. Under this circumstance, College ofEconomics and Management in LYUN (Longyan University) which consists of three majorsnamed Marketing, Public Business Administration (PBA) and International Economics andBusiness (IEB) offers different ESP courses including Business English, Public BusinessAdministration English, International Trade English and Oral English for International Tradefor respective majors.Taking the students in major of PBA as a sample group, the researcher wants to surveywhether the learners were satisfied with the courses, whether they benefit from the courses,and to what extent they satisfy and benefit in the teaching process of those courses. Toachieve the aim, after the process of the EPBA (English course for Public BusinessAdministration) course designed with the guidance of the classical theories of ESP,Curriculum design and Need analysis, the researcher utilized the instrument of questionnaireand interview to fulfill the investigation in the hope of diagnosing the problems existing andimproving the future course design of EPBA and other ESP course in the university.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is the introductive part which includesresearch background, purpose, significance, research questions and a brief introduction of thethesis structure. There are three research questions in this thesis, which are:1. whetherteaching materials of English courses for PBA meets learner needs;2. whether teachingmethodology of English courses for PBA meets learner needs; and3. whether evaluation of the English courses for PBA meets learner needs. In chapter two the literature review of therelated theories in the field of ESP, curriculum design and need analysis will be presented.Chapter three restates the research questions and the design of the research as well, includingresearch purposes, the subjects of the research, instruments used，the process, and thecollection of data. The software tools (SPSS17.0) used in results analysis will also beexplained there. Chapter four presents and discusses the result the research. In this chapter,the problems in English courses for students in college of economics and management arediagnosed through the comparison between the current situation of the course and students’needs. The results and discussion will be stated in each part. In the last part, chapter five givesa summary of the whole paper. It also discusses implications, limitations andrecommendations of this research.On the ground of the theories and teaching practice, this thesis has achieved the relativeresult to a certain extent. And the researcher hopes that the outcomes from the discussion andanalysis can arouse more attention to and provide some contribution to the ESP coursedevelopment.