Needs

Mixed in method, the present study investigated whether there was any significant difference between students’and teachers’perceptions of Iranian medical English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ language needs. In so doing, 220 EAP students of medicine, 30 subject-matter teachers of EAP, and 20 teachers of English for General Purposes (EGP) teaching medical EAP completed a Likert-scale questionnaire. Fifty of the students and 20 of the teachers also attended a semi-structured interview. The results of both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics indicated that, overall, there was a significant mismatch between the students’and the teachers’perceptions of medical EAP students’ needs. However, both teachers and students perceived reading comprehension as the most important language skill. Moreover, the students, in general, were found not to be satisfied with the EAP program presented to them. The results might prove fruitful for curriculum designers, materials developers, and teachers in (medical) EAP contexts to hear students’voices and to incorporate them in their programs, syllabi, and teaching.

The importance of incorporating graduate students' needs into academic writing courses has established a good reputation in EAP/ESP research. In addition, writing and publishing research articles (RA) is a universally established benchmark for students' academic flourish. The present study examines the status quo of academic writing courses in graduate programs to determine the extent academic writing needs of Applied Linguistics students, mainly RA writing needs, are addressed and practiced in the course. Drawing insights from the literature on academic writing, we developed two similar interview protocols for graduate students and course instructors to capture these key stakeholders' retrospective views on the course. We found that the course mainly focuses on proposal/thesis writing, not regarded as a critical need based on students' perspectives. Moreover, both students and instructors echoed the importance of RA writing as a significant area to be covered while emphasizing the need to integrate RA genre literacy into classroom practices. In this paper, we call for the reconsideration of students' primary needs in designing and running graduate writing programs and suggest that RA writing with a genre-based orientation become an instrumental component of academic writing courses in English as an Additional Language context (EAL).