Previous studies REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This chapter presents previous studies and theoretical reviews. There are five previous studies used as references in this study. In addition, the theoretical review consists of the definition of ESP, profile of Road Safety Transport Management Program Study, the definition of curriculum and syllabus, a syllabus framework selection, syllabus design, language skills analysis, and the level of difficulty of the language.

2.1 Previous studies

The studies about needs analysis and syllabus design on ESP have been widely conducted by some researchers. For instance, some scholars have also concerned with is the needs analysis and syllabus design particularly in engineering and technology courses. Regarding the study I intend to conduct, I use five previous studies related to the needs analysis and syllabus design based on ESP approach in engineering and technology courses. The first study was the one conducted by Flowerdew 2005, whose concern was in integrating traditional and critical approaches to syllabus design. This study described a course which, while taking place in an academic setting, is designed to equip undergraduates with general skills training in English for Occupational Purpose practices to meet students’ future communication needs after graduation. Her underlying theories were a task-based syllabus, a text-based syllabus, and a content-based syllabus for the design of the program. The second related study was the one conducted by P’rayan 2008. He explained that the aim of his study was to evaluate the needs and wants of the learners of English for Engineering at Anna University, Tamil Nadu, India since it was presumed that there were problems in the teaching of the course, as a result of inappropriate teaching material and instructional techniques. The data of this study was collected from different sources. After analyzing the data, the result of this study showed that the majority of ESP classes were teacher-dominated; hence the learners’ productive skills have been ignored. Moreover, he suggested that the objectives and the syllabus of the Anna University should be covered. However, he did not propose clearly what kind of syllabus which meets the learners’ need in order to make further course effective. The third one was conducted by Rahman 2010. His paper described the applications of the task-based approach to teach oral communication skills to the students of Engineering and Technology at Indian School of Mines, in an academic setting. He, further, discovered the possibility and feasibility of task- based approach to apply for the teaching of oral communication to make the students proficient in oral skill. In addition, Bouzid 2011 conducted a case study which proposed the task-based approach to teach English for first year post-graduate students of Genetics at Abou Bekr Belkai University of Tlemcen. There were three instruments to collect the necessary data: a questionnaire addressed to students, an interview arranged with both language and subject specialist teachers and a classroom observation. Furthermore, the result of this study showed that the students need specific English; therefore, task-based syllabus was adopted since it is believed to provide the Genetics students with a number of tasks that illustrate different situations needed by these learners and help them promote both accuracy and fluency. Moreover, Palangan 2014 designed an adapted syllabus of 1 st level conversation class for higher education students based on the learning-centered approach. Since he used learning-centered approach, needs analysis are the main characteristics in learning-centered approach. He did not only employ needs analysis, but also situation analysis to collect the information about learners’ needs. Furthermore, there were two findings on his thesis, the first was increasing of Student Talking Time STT particularly in “Engage and Study” session, and the second was equality of talking time between learners and teacher in ‘off-class conversation’ indicating what McCarthy 1991 considers as one of the characteristics of ‘a real world of conversation’. In light of those five previous studies as described above, this present study uses needs analysis to gather information of the students’ need and learning need. This present study, as well as the previous ones, used two underpinning theories i.e., task-based syllabus and text-based syllabus. However, this study focuses on designing an integrated syllabus in that the elements of different type of syllabus i.e., task-based and text-based syllabus are combined in ESP setting. It is further aimed at emphasizing both EAP and EOP.

2.2 Theoretical Review