Student-Perceived Communicative Needs in the Community College

Abstract

Most foreign language curricula and textbooks are organized around a hierarchy of grammatical structures sequenced in ways familiar to experienced instructors: subject pronouns, present tense, negation, adjectival agreement, demonstrative pronouns, past tense, passive constructions, and so forth. Presenting grammar in this traditional way seldom provides students with the structures they need to express their functional needs in the foreign language. For example, students who are learning the present tense in the beginning of their language course may want to describe what they did over the weekend; however, to do so, they would need to know some past tense verb forms which may not be introduced until a subsequent course. More practical and efficient methods and approaches to sequencing language courses and materials should be investigated. One approach to creating foreign language curricula and textbooks is to organize them partially around language functions that students perceive as essential to their current communicative needs. Some examples of language functions include introducing oneself and others, expressing likes and dislikes, asking directions, explaining what happened, and making suggestions.' One method of determining students' communicative needs is to survey their opinions by means of a questionnaire. Once the survey data have been collected and analyzed, one could begin to create course syllabi and materials that closely reflect what a given group of language students truly wants to express. Developing foreign language curricula and instructional materials based on this sort of empirically-derived information, rather than on tradition or guesswork, is a pragmatic and an efficient approach to language teaching.