Students’ Needs Analysis of General English Course at Halu Oleo University
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59065/jotes.v3i2.289Keywords:
Needs Analysis, General English, non-English major students, syllabus design, Higher EducationAbstract
The General English course is a compulsory subject for non-English major students in Indonesian higher education. However, the curriculum is not comprehensive enough to meet the learners’ needs for academic and communicative competence. This study aims to investigate the needs of non-English-major students in the General English course at Universitas Halu Oleo, Indonesia, regarding language components, skills, learning difficulties, and classroom activities. The quantitative study involved 123 students in the 2025/2026 academic year. Data were collected through a questionnaire with a Likert scale, and analysed through descriptive statistics in IBM SPSS Statistics. The results showed that students were interested in improving their pronunciation and that the most difficult part was grammar. The most developed and desirable skill in the classroom was listening. The less developed skill was speaking. Students also complained about sentence structure, vocabulary, grammar accuracy, and pronunciation. Results show a re-organization of the general English teaching through a needs-based approach that includes pronunciation practice, vocabulary development, contextualized grammar, guided speaking tasks, reading support, and a variety of classroom activities.
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