Needs-based curriculum design for academic writing in Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

The present article addresses the complexity of writing a final project in a foreign language to obtain a university diploma. The study investigates how working with needs analysis can contribute to designing and implementing an academic writing workshop tailored to the participants. Specifically, the article targets an academic writing course in Spanish as a foreign language at a Danish university as a case study and presents the design of our needs analysis and the obtained results. The research design is based on questionnaires on self-assessed needs. Based on the answers at the beginning of the course, a writing workshop was designed to respond to the students’ formulated needs. At the end of the course, a similar questionnaire was applied to measure the impact of the needs analysis-based workshop on the students’ self-assessed learning. A positive result was attained, which encourages the use of this pedagogical strategy for curriculum design.