ISSN: 2226-6348
Open access
A dearth of research has carried out to identify the learning and target needs in oral business English (OBE) courses for Chinese EFL undergraduates from the perspectives of teachers. Furthermore, assessing the validity and reliability of the needs-analysis instruments has been neglected, though needs analysis is considered as one of the major concerns in teaching English for specific purposes (ESP). Accordingly, this study aims at investigating the content validity, construct validity, and reliability of the research instrument. Based on the rigorous review of previous literature, the researchers determined the prospective constructs and questionnaire items that attribute to the measurement of Chinese EFL students’ needs in OBE courses as perceived by teachers. The content validity of the Chinese EFL students’ needs questionnaire containing 17 items based on a 5-point Likert scale was examined by three Ph.D. holders with expertise in ESP fields. For data collection, a total of 36 teacher respondents from Business English department involved in the study. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was utilized to examine the construct of the questionnaire where a total of three constructs have been extracted: i) perceived teaching of speaking, ii) perceived performance of students, iii) perceived use of materials with the factor loading ranging from 0.448 to 0.972. In terms of instrument reliability, Cronbach’s alpha (?) fell in a range of 0.80 to 0.90, which indicates a high level of reliability. It is hoped that the results of this study could be insightful to developing research instrument for ESP studies.
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