Investigating Needs Analysis of Undergraduate Students majoring in Applied Linguistics

Abstract

The English language has long been considered an internationally accepted facet of communication. Hence, to survive and succeed in the global environment, it is imperative to have proficiency in English. Keeping in mind the global needs of  English, the study was conducted to find out learners' needs,  wants, and expectations from functional English courses and possible ways to address them. The approach to the language learners’ needs followed the standard dogmas. A survey was conducted with the target audience of first-year students of the English department, at the University of Sindh. The research uses a structured questionnaire to collect and analyze data from the committee. The committee provided explicit instructions to fill out the questionnaire. The output received revealed that the majority of the participants belonging to remote areas achieved education from public sectors with average English language proficiency. The worrisome problem noted is that they lack speaking and writing skills. Since English is used as Lingua Franca, they think it is important to acquire English language skills for their personal and professional growth and future endeavors. The result elicited that participants should be given more exposure to the English language with a focus on speaking and writing skills. It reveals that there is an urgent need to include English primarily in the national curriculum and should be used frequently by the participants to meet the global demand for English.