For over three decades now, research on undergraduate student pedagogy has shifted focus from an error analysis tradition to an emphasis on learner needs. As part of this shift, we examined the needs of students who offered Communicative Skills in an English-medium university in Ghana, and whether their needs were discipline-specific. Data were collected from two hundred and forty students and twenty lecturers, using a two-pronged sampling method. Major results showed a great need for grammar and writing skills among students, though they held that note taking and note making skills, outlining and skimming be expunged from the programme. The study also indicated that although teachers of Communicative Skills preferred a variationist approach, the reverse was the case among their students. Surprisingly, while students desired to be exposed to modern skills such as CV and Proposal writing, their instructors, on the other hand, were of the view that paragraph and essay development were not so useful. The study, thus, resonates with proclivities for further interventionist methods, specialist instructor (re)training and future research in undergraduate student writing.
The scholarship on undergraduate student pedagogy has continually been faced with how best to improve upon learners’ knowledge of communicative skills. In Ghana, as in most non-native contexts, the research landscape is occupied with error analysis, despite the demand for studies on needs analysis (Dako & Forson, 1997; Dzameshie, 1997; Ababio, 2009) . The extant literature is also replete with reductionist studies that examine such patterns of errors as spelling, tense and concord in Ghanaian university students’ writing (Yankson, 1994; Dako & Forson, 1997) . At the discourse level, it has been found that university students’ essay prompts lack cohesion and has a weak thematic progression that often leads to flat paragraphs and undeveloped rhemes (Dako & Forson, 1997; Appiah, 2002; Adika, 2003) .
Given the foci of previous approaches, prominent among which is error analysis (e.g. Yankson, 1994; Edu- Buandoh, 1997; Appiah, 2002; Adika, 2003 ) to learner proficiency in Ghana, research into the unique needs of undergraduate students of Communicative Skills (otherwise known as General English or English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in foreign universities) is lacking (contra Dzameshie, 1997; Afful, 2007 ). As Seedhouse (1995) argues, “Needs analysis is rarely carried out in the General English classroom partly because of an erroneous belief that it is not possible to specify the needs of General English learners” (p. 59). Yet it is only when pedagogues and researchers identify students’ learning difficulties that they can devise learner-centred and task- based curricula (Berwick, 1989; Dudley-Evans & John, 1998; Ababio, 2009) . Needs analysis is, therefore, “the systematic collection and analysis of all relevant information necessary in the language learning requirements of the students within the context of the particular institutions involved in the learning situation” (Brown, 1995: p. 12) . This current methodology is pivotal in learner pedagogy in Ghana because
Not until the teacher knows the needs of his/her students, he/she cannot plan a teachable lesson. The difficulty of the material to be covered, the amount of material to be learned must be determined by the teacher in relation to the abilities of the individuals to be taught or reached (Ababio, 2009: p. 2) .
The argument becomes even more poignant given that the needs and orientations of students may vary with respect to such variables as their programmes of study, educational backgrounds and interests (Afful, 2007) .
In view of the present approach, the study aimed at identifying the needs of Communicative Skills (CS) students of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), a public English medium university in Ghana established in 1962, in order to inform best teaching practices and maximise learners’ understanding of topics treated during contact hours. For this reason, the study sought to meet the following specific objectives:
1) Examine whether the needs of CS students at UCC vary in respect of their programmes of study.
2) Compare the needs of first year CS students and continuing students.
3) Identify the views of CS lecturers concerning the needs of CS students.
The study is a descriptive survey which enables researchers “to count; when they cannot count every one, it counts a representative sample and then makes inferences about the population as a whole” (Oppenheim, 1996: p. 8 cited in Ababio, 2009 ). A major advantage of the descriptive survey is its potential to provide researchers with a lot of information obtained from quite a large sample of individuals. The design is, therefore, useful in the present study because we aimed at ascertaining difficulties learners of CS encounter in order to surmount them through best interventionist programmes and revised course content.
The total population of students that offered CS in the 2010/2011 academic year stood at 4083 (UCC Student Records and Management Information Section, 2010). Following Cohen, Manion and Morrison’s (2000) typology for determining a sample size, we obtained an accessible population of 240 participants drawn from all the faculties. They comprised 120 first year CS students and 120 second, third and fourth year undergraduate students. Twenty lecturers who teach CS were selected out of a total of forty-five on the basis of their willingness to participate in the study.
The sample size was obtained, using a two-pronged sampling method. First, a simple random sampling was done in order to guarantee fairness of representativeness and the validity of results (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2000; Cresswell, 2003) . Participants were then selected based on stratified sampling technique. Thus, 30 students were selected from all the faculties and schools (i.e. School of Medical Sciences and School of Agriculture ) of the university. Besides, the selection reflected gender representativeness, comprising 15 males and 15 females.
Two sets of questionnaire (Appendix) were administered. The first and second sought to sample the views of CS students and CS lecturers respectively on the relevance, course components of the programme, and whether Communicative Skills should be taught based on students’ programmes of study. These instruments were useful because they were amenable to statistical computations given the relatively large sample size of the study (Fraenkell & Wallen, 2000) . Further, the questionnaire has proven to be handy in needs analysis research (Richards, 2001; Ababio, 2009) . The questionnaires comprised both closed-ended and open ended questions which were constructed on the Likert scale. The open-ended questions enabled respondents to express their views on issues which they hardly could convey in close-ended questions. A Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient of 0.819 and 0.817 were obtained for the students’ and lecturers’ questionnaires respectively.
The mixed method of data analysis, quantitative and qualitative paradigms, was employed. As a form of methodological triangulation, this method of analysing data strengthens the validity of results (Cresswell, 2003) . Inferential statistics was mainly used as a rigorous statistical package to reveal statistically significant differences or otherwise of elements under comparison. This method was supported by qualitative content analysis with the view to supply a detailed description of a point made.
This strand discusses among other things the background information, CS needs of first year and continuing students and CS lecturers’ views on CS students’ needs. Others include test for significant differences between first year and continuing students as well as responses on the relevance of Communicative Skills to university education and the job market.
Available evidence shows that out of a sample size of two hundred and sixty (made up of 240 students and 20 lecturers), 240 of them responded of which 91.7% were students while the remaining were lecturers. Of this number, the first year students accounted for 120 while the continuing students also totalled 120.
The figure below shows a greater percentage of females (53%) compared than males (43%), thus indicating a difference of six percent. This difference was, however, not marginal to favour former over the latter in the analysis of the data. In addition, the educational background of respondents was also sought in order to understand the kind of educational training they had had.
It can be seen from
In respect of which course components are most useful to CS students, 86.4% of the respondents agreed that concord, dangling modification and ambiguity are the most useful components of the Communicative Skills programme. This concession rated an average value of 3.33. With the lowest mean of 2.71, 36.6% of the Level 100 students claimed that Basic Sentence Patterns is the most useful component of the programme. Indeed, the views of respondents are in tandem with Afful’s (2007) conviction that CS students still believe that some components of the programme are no more useful. On the question of whether the teaching of the programme should be discipline-specific, it was observed that a 2.8 mean value was obtained. This means that respondents hardly agreed to this view, perhaps because they are less knowledgeable of its pedagogical significance.
The study also sought to investigate whether there exist any significant differences between the needs of Level 100 CS students and continuing (Level 200, 300 and 400) students. An independent sample t-test was run and the results are contained in
From
Faculty/school | Frequency | Percentage (%) |
---|---|---|
Education | 87 | 39.55 |
Sciences (physical/biological/agric/medical) | 41 | 18.64 |
Arts | 32 | 14.55 |
Business | 30 | 13.64 |
Social sciences | 30 | 13.64 |
Total | 220 | 100.2 |
respondents that there was no significant difference between the needs of first year students and continuing students in Communicative Skills.
Further, an ANOVA test was run to determine whether there exist any significant differences among students’ Communicative Skills needs based on their faculties and schools.
In all, the students across the various faculties and schools differed on only four (4) items out of the 25 constituting 16%. For instance, there was no universal agreement among respondents from the various faculties and schools with regards to whether CS is important to students. They also expressed varied perceptions as to whether or not Communicative Skills is really meeting students’ communicative needs. Again, the students from the various faculties and schools differed in their responses on whether or not reading and listening are the most important components of the programme. The lack of concession in students’ responses shows that they tacitly do not support a programme-specific teaching approach.
With regards to whether such writing skills as paragraph and essay writing are the most useful components of the programme, a least mean value of 2.78 was obtained. This observation is rather worrying in the sense that it is generally believed that a writing course like CS should enhance learners’ writing skills because “students usually produce many kinds of writing: notes during class sessions, written assignments, term papers…” (Biber & Conrad, 2009: p. 1) . Nonetheless, they seem to endorse the remediational concept of Communicative Skills that the primary objective of Communicative Skills is to correct students’ grammatical errors. This is because their responses rated an average low value of 1.95.
Further, unlike their students, the majority of the lecturers (70%) agreed that Communicative Skills should be taught according to students’ specific programmes of study. This view attracted an average value of 3.15. In other words, lecturers felt that different course contents and methods of delivery should be adopted in teaching students from such disciplines as Medical Sciences, Education or the Humanities. Such a need is crucial because contemporary research in student pedagogy now emphasises a variationist approach to teaching more than a generalist perspective (Dillon, 1991; MacDonald, 1994; Afful, 2005) . As Afful (2007) argues, “Disciplines revolve around certain phenomena in the construction of knowledge” (p. 149).
Below is catalogued some views expressed by both students and lecturers on the relevance of Communicative Skills to university education and the world of work. An interesting revelation from