{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03616546940797622, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01758731731483775, 'mean_word_length': 5.37914691943128, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Needs Analysis Approach to the Design of College English Elective Courses: A Descriptive Account of Chinese College Students’ Needs

This descriptive NA research with 455 participants studies the Chinese independently-run college learners’ needs, to help teachers design College English elective courses. It finds that the learners’ target needs include to pass English exams for future career and academic study, and to talk fluently in English; students’ learning needs are to satisfy the personal interest, to learn autonomously with passionate and knowledgeable teachers in a relaxed atmosphere with authentic, creative and enlightening class activities with authentic learning materials, and to develop their cognition in the first and the second academic years. Proposals for College English elective courses design are made accordingly. College English electives is an essential section of College English education which has been under national-wide reform in China, required by College English Curriculum Requirements (2007) (Requirements hereafter), a government guideline of College English education, issued by the Ministry of Education of P.R.China. Elective courses are expected to allow students to extend their studies and experiences beyond the learning of the core curriculum and required courses, to pursue the personal, academic and vocational needs and interest. Yet, with 160 minute-long in-class comprehensive College English course learning a week, students do not have enough language explosions. Therefore, taking College English elective courses is a necessary compliment for English learning. To scientifically design College English elective courses, a needs survey has to be carried out before frameworks are written (Yalden, 2000: 131). Needs Analysis (NA hereafter) has been recognized as the starting step and also the indispensable part in curriculum design before syllabus, materials and teaching activities are decided. NA began to raise the interest of educators and researchers as the learner-centered communicative language teaching sprung in 1970s. According to Long (2005:21), most needs analysts developed from the Council of Europe in the early 1970s by Wilkins, Richterich and others, and related studies such as that conducted by Munby. By means of NA questionnaire and investigation on the students of three independently-run colleges in Guilin, Guangxi Province, namely, LC of GNU (Lijiang College of Guangxi Normal University), IIT of GUET (Institute of Information Technology of Guilin University of Electronic Technology), and BCM of GUT (Bowen College of Management Guilin University of Technology), this study aims: (1) to investigate students’ needs towards College English electives, including target needs and learning needs, both including 6 categories respectively: why, who, what, how, when, where; (2) to give recommendations for improving the teaching of College English elective course in independently-run colleges. 1. Needs and Needs Analysis The word Needs has been defined from different perspectives. Some give it a clear definition, while some state the domains it covers. Dubin et al. (2006:4) point out that needs are closely related to individual learners and change and shift during the period of a course. In the language-centered approach, Hutchinson et al. (2002:54) define needs as “the ability to comprehend and/or produce the linguistic features of the target situation”. Berwick (1989: 52) states that “needs is ......as a gap or measurable discrepancy between a current state of affairs and a desired future state”. Nunan (2005:4) refers needs as the collection of information about learners. 6th International Education, Economics, Social Science, Arts, Sports and Management Engineering Conference (IEESASM 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 294