The Definition of Needs Assessment

Needs assessment or needs analysis in a language program is often viewed simply as identification of the language forms that the students will likely need to use in the target language when they are required to actually understand and to produce the language. In general term, needs assessment also called needs assessment, refers to the activities involved in gathering information that will serve as the basis for developing a curriculum that will meet the learning needs of particular group of students. In the case of language program, those needs will be language related. Once identified, needs can be stated in terms of goals and objectives which in turn, can serve as the basis for developing tests, materials, teaching activities, and evaluation strategies, as well as for reevaluating the precision and accuracy of the original needs assessment.

Different between Extensive and Intensive Reading

1. Purpose :

· In extensive reading the purpose is to understanding generally what the book tells about, usually, the vocabulary of extensive reading is the easy one or the vocabulary that usually use the readers only a little bite that difficult one. So that, the readers to be enjoyment what they read not to borring. And, they have a fantastic spirit for finishing it and try to read more book like it too.

Extensive Reading

I. Definition of Extensive Reading

• Brown (1989) explains that extensive reading is carried out "to achieve a general understanding of a text."
• Long and Richards (1971, p.216) identify extensive reading as "occurring when students read large amounts of high interest material, usually out of class, concentrating on meaning, "reading for gist" and skipping unknown words."
• The aims of extensive reading are to build reader confidence and enjoyment.
• Extensive reading is always done for the comprehension of main ideas, not for specific details.

Intensive Reading

I. Definition of Intensive Reading

• Brown (1989) explains that intensive reading "calls attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships, and the like." He draws an analogy to intensive reading as a "zoom lens" strategy . 
• Long and Richards (1987) say it is a "detailed in-class" analysis, led by the teacher, of vocabulary and grammar points, in a short passage."

How Do Teachers Help Students Notice?

How can we as teachers help students notice target forms? Cross (2002) summarizes factors that draw attention to certain features in input:

Noticing and Language Learning

Noticing what we are doing while we are learning a language, its impacts on others as well as ourselves is a key to language learning. As to be expected many language learners, to a large degree, rely upon how they have been taught to learn a language. However most language teaching practices seem to concentrate on teaching the language and not on the process of learning the language, so it is not surprising that many key factors are overlooked.

Pedagogical Implication of Noticing Hypothesis

There is no consensus agreement concerning the role of noticing in SLA due to the directly unobservable nature of noticing as well as that the level of noticing may be affected by variables including attention being directed elsewhere, the level of language ability of learners, the complexity of information being processed and the speed or audibility of presentation (Schmidt, 1993). But it has rich pedagogical implications for teaching, especially in China. The reasons are as follows: