Toward the New Concept of Needs Analysis: English for Medical Professionals inJapan

This paper is a preliminary study to conduct a needs analysis of medical doctors to explorewhat is needed in English education in medical schools. In the dissertation, succeeding afterthis paper, a multidimensional needs analysis will be introduced as a way to present the newconcept of needs analysis that will be break away from the conventional needs analysis. Thedata will be collected from interviews, participants’ observations, e-mail exchanges, andquestionnaires, which will be investigated by adopting several models to discover the needsof doctors who work in the medical field and students who want to become medical experts.This preliminary study is also intended to categorize a study of English for Medical Purposes(EMP) in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in order to direct its attention tothe needs of medical doctors and to develop a curriculum for English in the Faculty ofMedicine. This paper will introduce some previous research on conventional needs analysisand look at how previous researchers conceptualized and classified needs analysis in thepast. Since each researcher’s viewpoint is different, this paper will critically compare theclassification of previous researcher’s perspectives and indicate which viewpoint will beadopted in the succeeding multidimensional needs analysis. This paper will clarify whichstance should be applied to EMP as well as broader academic settings such as law,economics, mathematics and engineering as a study of ESP.

Keywords:

Needs Analysis , Discourse Analysis , English for Medical Purposes , English forSpecific Purposes