MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ------------ TRAN THI NI AN INVESTIGATION INTO ESP NEEDS OF STUDENTS OF NURSING PROGRAMME AT HUE MEDICAL COLLEGE FIELD OF STUDY: THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 60.10 MA THESIS IN EDUCATION SUPERVISOR: PHAM THI HONG NHUNG, D. HUẾ, 2012 BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐẠI HỌC HUẾ TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ ------------ TRẦN THỊ NI KHẢO SÁT NHU CẦU TIẾNG ANH CHUYÊN NGÀNH CỦA SINH VIÊN CAO ĐẲNG ĐIỀU DƢỠNG TẠI TRƢỜNG CAO ĐẲNG Y TẾ HUẾ CHUYÊN NGÀNH: LÝ LUẬN VÀ PHƢƠNG PHÁP DẠY - HỌC MÔN TIẾNG ANH MÃ SỐ: 60.10 LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ GIÁO DỤC HỌC NGƢỜI HƢỚNG DẪN KHOA HỌC: TS. PHẠM THỊ HỒNG NHUNG HUẾ, 2012 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I hereby acknowledge that this study is mine. The data and findings discussed in the thesis are true, used with permission from associates, and have not been published elsewhere.
Author Tran Thi Ni Acknowledgement First and foremost, I offer my sincerest gratitude to Dr. Pham Thi Hong Nhung, the Vice Rector of Hue College of Foreign Languages for her valuable guidance, suggestions, comments and encouragement, without which the work would not have been completed. I am also grateful to Dr. Truong Bach Le for his kind help and expert advice on initiating the ideas for my thesis.
I would also like to express my sincere thanks to all professors and lecturers at Hue College of Foreign Languages for their enthusiasm and useful lectures. In addition, I am greatly indebted to my colleagues at Hue Medical College, who kindly helped me much in constructing the questionnaire and analyzing data. My special thanks also go to all nursing students at Hue Medical College for their participation as well as their thoughtful responses, which created favorable conditions for data collection and analysis. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my family, my relatives and my friends for their support and encouragement during my study.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Content Pages SUB COVER PAGE STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS .1 LIST OF ABRREVIATIONS .4 LIST OF TABLES .4 Significance of the study .5 Scope of the study .6 Outline of the thesis .11 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Definition of key terms .1 English for specific purposes .1 What is ESP.2 Classification of ESP .2 Needs analysis and ESP .2 Needs analysis and ESP .3 Teachers and students‟ perceptions.2 Theoretical framework of the study .1 Characteristics of ESP .2 The important role of needs analysis in ESP .3 Components of Needs Analysis .4 Approaches to needs analysis in ESP .3 A learning-centred approach .4 Learner-centred approaches .5 A task-based approach .5 Principles of needs analysis .6 Instrumental types of needs analysis .3 An overview of the ESP course for the students of nursing programme at Hue Medical College .4 A review of relevant studies .3 Data collection methods .1 The design of questionnaire .2 Validating and revising the questionnaire .3 Reliabilty of the Questionnaire .4 Data collection procedure .5 Data analysis method .46 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 4.1 ESP needs analysis of the students .1 The importance of ESP for the students‟ future career .2 The reasons for learning English for specific purposes .3 The importance of English language skills and aspects. The importance of language skills .2 The importance of language aspects .3 The importance of sub-skills of reading comprehension .4 The importance of sub-skills of speaking .5 The importance of sub-skills of writing .6 The importance of sub-skills of listening comprehension .2 Students‟ overall perceptions of the current ESP course .1 The stress of each language skill and aspect in the current ESP course 61 4.2 The relevance of the current ESP course to the students‟ needs for their occupational purposes .63 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS .1 Overview of the Study .1 The ESP needs of the students .2 The students‟ perception of the current ESP course .3 Implications for practice .4 Limitation of the study .73 APPENDICES 3 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ESP : English for specific purposes EGP : English for general purposes GE : General English MOH : Ministry of Health NA : Needs analysis 4 LIST OF TABLES Pages Table 4.1: The importance of ESP to the students‟ future work .2: The students‟ reasons for learning ESP .3: The importance of English Language skills .4: The importance of English Language aspects .5: The importance of sub-skills of reading comprehension .6: The importance of sub-skills of speaking .7: The importance of sub-skills of writing .8: The importance of sub-skills of listening comprehension .9: The stress of language skills and aspects in the current course .10: The relevance of the current ESP course to the students‟ needs .63 5 ABSTRACT Given the necessity of needs analysis in ESP courses and the current development of nursing, this study carried out an investigation into ESP needs of students of the three-year nursing programme at Hue Medical College. Through a needs analysis, the study aims to explore the students‟ ESP needs for occupational purposes in terms of English language skills, aspects and sub-skills as well as to find out the students‟ perception of the current ESP course. The total population of the research is 634 students of the three-year nursing programme at Hue Medical College in academic year 2011-2012.
Quantitative and qualitative approaches are the main methods. The tools for data collection are questionnaires and interviews. The findings reveal that nursing students are clearly aware of the importance of ESP to their future career. In addition, listening comprehension is considered as the most important, followed by speaking, reading comprehension and writing.
In terms of language aspects, the greatest importance is attached to communication, followed by vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. The importance of sub-skills is also shown. Moreover, the study reveals that students are partly satisfied with the current ESP course. The overall results indicate that the ESP course for nursing students must focus on listening comprehension and speaking to strengthen the communication competence for their occupational purposes.
Some other implications and suggestions are also given for revising the current ESP course for better relevance to students‟ needs. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter first presents the rationale of the study. It then identifies the research aims and objectives. Next, research questions and scope of the study are followed.
The chapter ends with an illustration of the thesis‟s organization.1 Rationale As part of a more general movement of teaching “Language for Specific Purposes”, “English for Specific Purposes” (ESP) originally flourished in the 1950s and 1960s with the effect of such general developments in the world economy as the growth of science and technology; the increased use of English as the international language of science, technology and business; and the increased economic power of certain oil-rich countries (Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998, p. The general context led to “a whole new mass of people who wanted to learn English” for its importance to the fields of technology and commerce. Consequently, ESP teaching movement emerged from the English language needs of the learners for specific purposes in accordance with their professions or studies (Rahman et al, 2008). Thus, the learners‟ needs are of great value in building ESP courses.
The identification of those needs requires a needs analysis. This is confirmed by Richard et al (1985) that through a needs analysis, general to specific language needs would be explored, which helped develop goals, objectives and content for a language programme as well as provide data for reviewing and evaluating an existing programme. Therefore, needs analysis is also used for a number of different purposes, i.e, to find out what language skills a learner needs in order to perform a particular role, to help determine if an existing course adequately addresses the needs of potential students, to determine which students from a group are most in need of training in particular language skills, to identify a change of direction that people in a reference group feel is important; to identify a gap between what 7 students are able to do and what they need to be able to; and to collect information about a particular problem learners are experiencing. With the key role of needs analysis in ESP course, many scholars have conducted needs analysis for a better understanding of the English language needs of students of different majors and occupations in the world.
Hwang and Lin (2010) conducted a needs analysis to provide a description of the linguistic needs and perceptions of medical students at Chung Shan Medical University in Taiwan. In another study, Chostelidou (2010) conducted a need analysis on students of Accountancy in the A. of Thessaloniki in Greece. Khajavi and Gordani (2010) investigated English language needs of MA students from six faculties of Isfahan University in Iran.
Kaur and Khan (2010) carried out a language needs Analysis of diploma Art and Design students in a private college in Penang, Malaysia to evaluate the students‟ perceptions about the current English Language course. Salehi (2010) carried out an investigation into the English language needs of engineering students at Sharif University of Technology. To determine what students need to achieve through the medium of English accurately, Altamimi and Shuib (2010) implemented a survey on the English language needs of petroleum engineering students at Hadhramout University of Science and Technology. Of all occupations, nursing nowadays witnesses much development and integration.
It is developing into a vital public service sector when the demand for healthcare services with high quality is highly increasing in every country for the increase of old population. In addition, the lack of nurses in many nations leads to the policies of recruiting nurses to the developed countries such as America, Canada, and Japan. Consequently, more than ever before, the migration of nurses is taking place strongly in the range of the whole globe (Ministry of Health, 2012). In the international and regional integration trend of Nursing, the Vietnamese Government signed the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA) with 10 Asian nations with respect to nursing service, which allows the legal occupational practice for the nurses in the member nations.
Through this, the qualifications of junior college (three-year) and university (four-year) are becoming a minimum 8 requirement for nurses to register occupational practices and to be acknowledged as professional nurses between the Asian nations and in the world (Ministry of Health, 2012). In addition, it can be observed that many international hospitals have been being built for the increase of foreign people in Vietnam. Accordingly, all raise the need for working in foreign countries as well as in hospital with high quality among in-service nurses and graduate nursing students without doubt. In this situation, General English and ESP play a key role to help them satisfy the requirements of language.
Moreover, to strengthen the quality of Vietnam‟s nursing resources in accordance with the world nursing, the Ministry of Health (2012) launched Vietnam‟s Nursing Competency Standard under the support of Canadian Nursing Council and Queensland Technology University - Australia. In addition, from 2006 until now the Ministry of Health has been carried out the SMS project to strengthen Medical schools with the focus on nursing. Some important activities implemented are revising documents of clinical nursing skills with the reference of Australian documents; assigning representatives and nursing teachers to the Philippines and Japan to find out clinical teaching models; and training nursing teachers and in- service nurses about clinical teaching skills under the instructions of Australian and Netherlands experts. All of these show that the integration of foreign programme and knowledge is becoming necessary for Vietnam nursing to reach the World nursing.
This leads to the needs of professional exchanges with foreign experts as well as further studies in foreign countries. As such, it also requires in-service nurses and nursing students at all levels to master not only GE but also ESP without doubt.