NEEDS ANALYSIS IN ENGLISH FOR SECURITY STUDIES

Abstract

ESP has become an increasingly important branch of ELT imposing new requirements and criteria to be met by teaching professionals and ESP practitioners. Designing an ESP course is one of these requirements, with learner needs analysis as its key first stage informing further steps within this complex cyclical process. This paper presents and discusses the results of a needs analysis of students of security studies in relation to their professional careers as perceived by first- and second-year students and the academic staff of the University of Belgrade - Faculty of Security Studies. Questionnaires were administered to these three groups of stakeholders, who were asked to evaluate the importance of language sub-activities within communicative language activities for students’ professional careers. Their evaluations were analysed to identify the most important language activities for all three groups and then compared to find similarities and differences in their perceptions. This paper offers insight into how these findings can be used to inform course design so as to best reflect security students’ needs and enable them operate effectively within target communicative situations.