Communicative English skills needs of EFL undergraduate students and the perception of their instructors about students’ needs

Abstract

This study examined EFL students’ perceived language skills needs and compared students’ preferences with their instructors’ perception towards the importance of each skill to their students at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia. Questionnaires were administered and collected from an accessible population of 80 participants that was drawn from two colleges. Among thirty-seven instructors who were teaching the course “Communicative English Skills”, twelve were selected using a systematic random sampling method by taking every third from a list of instructors assigned by the department. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data.  The results showed that students valued receptive skills more than productive skills, whereas their instructors rated writing and reading as the two most important skills for student learning.  The result also found that students and instructors showed discrepancies in their perceptual needs in listening and writing skills, in which students rated the listening skill as the most important next to reading and instructors rated writing skills as the most important.  Implications for teaching communicative English Skills by integrating all the skills together and the necessity of further research are presented.