Assessing the English Language Needs of Persian Literature University Students from Teachers’ Perspective

Since needs analysis firstly introduced by the publication of Munby’s communicative syllabus design in 1978, many researchers carried out on the needs analysis of university students majoring different courses who were attending language courses in order to preparing for their target language needs. The purpose of this study is to identify the English language needs of the Persian literature university students. To this effect, five female and five male specialist English teachers in three universities in Tehran and two universities in Zanjan were picked by convenience sampling to be data sources of the study. All the teachers have Ph.D. level of education, teaching M.A. students of Persian literature. The data were collected using a five point Likert scale English Language needs questionnaire (Chan, 2001). The questionnaires were given to specialist teachers who teach M.A. Persian literature students in different universities. In order to analyze the data, mean and Chi-Square test were used. As the results show, reading skill is the most important skill in academic studies of the Persian literature university students, speaking skill is the most essential skill in their future profession, and writing skill is the main skill that would be important in their private/social life. The female specialist English teachers’ perspective is different from male ones regarding Persian literature university students’ learning needs and target needs. This study has implications for language researchers, specialist English teachers, test designers, and materials developers.