The Effectiveness of Needs Analysis Informing ESP Syllabus Design

In the ESP process, needs analysis initially concerns learners’ learning needs, which are then transformed into learning objectives, in turn severing as the foundation for further stages. In practice, how to design ESP syllabus effectively and efficiently still remains controversial. This paper examined how NA informs ESP syllabus design in three steps: preparations, actions, and applications, through the comparison of six academic articles related to their purposes, participants, sample sizes, ethic issues, methods of data collection, data analysis, and applications. The findings suggest that needs analysis should pay more attention on ethic issues, triangulations, and validities.