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

Emiko Matsumoto,

Juntendo University, Japan

This paper is a preliminary study to conduct a needs analysis of medical doctors to explore what is needed in English education in medical schools. In the dissertation, succeeding after this paper, a multidimensional needs analysis will be introduced as a way to present the new concept of needs analysis that will be break away from the conventional needs analysis. The data will be collected from interviews, participants’ observations, e-mail exchanges, and questionnaires, which will be investigated by adopting several models to discover the needs of 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 to the needs of medical doctors and to develop a curriculum for English in the Faculty of Medicine. This paper will introduce some previous research on conventional needs analysis and look at how previous researchers conceptualized and classified needs analysis in the past. Since each researcher’s viewpoint is different, this paper will critically compare the classification of previous researcher’s perspectives and indicate which viewpoint will be adopted in the succeeding multidimensional needs analysis. This paper will clarify which stance 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 for Specific Purposes

The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 14-15 February 2023, Ahwaz.