NEEDS ASSESSMENT OF ARCHITECTURE ENGINEERING STUDENTS

English language teaching has become very important because of the global status of English and people all over the world are learning this language. The effective assessment of English language learners’ needs, goals, and interests is integral to developing particular kinds of curricula and classroom instruction that lead to the optimal level of achievement at the end. Given the unavoidable importance of needs analysis in English for specific purposes (ESP) and English for academic purposes (EAP), this paper investigates the linguistic needs of architecture engineering students at five universities in Iran. More specifically, the study aims to identify students’ perceptions towards the importance of English skills, evaluation of students’ weaknesses in English, assessment of students’ needs and suggestions for improving architecture engineering curriculum. 384 architecture engineering undergraduates and 15 teachers in the academic year 2013 filled out a questionnaire. The questionnaire related to both teachers and learners had one section in common. The results of the study indicated that English is very significant for the students and some skills are more important than others for them. However, the students’ and teachers’ perspectives are quite different considering the priorities. ANOVA was used to find out the differences between means of the preferred skills for both groups of students and teachers. In addition, Scheffe test was used to determine and compare the priority of skill preferences by each group. The study would benefit ESP/EAP teachers to recognize architecture engineering studentsʹ needs and preferred skills, provide proper teaching material and teaching methodology accordingly.