Developing an English for Specific Purposes Need Profile among Library and Information Science Students in Vietnam

An extensive search of existing literature revealed no research that specifically focused on the needs for English for specific purposes (ESP) of pre-service and in-service librarians within the Vietnamese higher education context. This study aimed to address this gap by developing an ESP needs profile of the pre-service and in-service librarians at a Vietnamese university. Two questionnaires were designed and administered to a total of 185 pre-service and in-service librarians. The results from this study show that both groups of the participants highly valued the importance of ESP. The results also reveal that the perceived needs for the four English language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) of the two groups were quite similar, except for reading. In addition, the pre-service and in-service librarians expressed their diverse needs for both academic and occupational English.


INTRODUCTION
This study was undertaken at Sun University (Sun University was used as a pseudonym for the university within which this study was undertaken in order to protect its identity), a public university administered by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET). Library and information science (LIS) is an undergraduate program at Sun University. As this program was funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies from America, its curriculum was developed by many professional experts and instructors from American and Australian universities. Enrolling in the LIS program, students have numerous opportunities to get much exposure to the English language because most of the textbooks and reference materials are written in English. To receive a Bachelor's degree from this program, students must undertake a total of 140 credits of different courses. Among them, there are three courses of General English and two courses of English for Library and Information Science (English for LIS) that are compulsory for students.
In the ESP literature, a number of need analysis (NA) studies have been reported (Ahmmed et al., 2020;Nimasari, 2018). Even though NA plays a crucial role in ESP as commented by Woodrow (2018, p. 21): "Needs analysis is the backbone of ESP course design" and the way in which NA is implemented is not the same in different situations of the ESP settings. Under the English language teaching (ELT) context in Sun University, the importance of NA in ESP had not been highly valued. This university had not undertaken any research projects on needs analysis to obtain feedback from students, course designers or other stakeholders when designing and delivering these ESP courses. Moreover, an extensive search of existing literature revealed no research that particularly focused on the needs for ESP of Vietnamese pre-service and in-service librarians (Nhung & Hoa, 2021). This study has attempted to supplement the limited empirical literature located within the Vietnamese context by exploring how pre-service and in-service librarians perceived their needs for ESP. This insight is very important for course designers and language instructors in planning and implementing high-quality ESP courses in the setting of higher education reforms in Vietnam.

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 126  In the New Oxford Dictionary of English, Pearsall and Hanks (1998) define pre-service as the period before a person takes a job that requires training while in-service is intended for the period when a person actively engages in the profession or activity concerned. In this current study, pre-service librarians refer to the students who were majoring in LIS by the time of conducting this study. Furthermore, in-service librarians are defined as those who were working in different positions in the libraries. More specifically, this study addresses the two research questions: 1. To what extent do pre-service and in-service librarians value the importance of ESP in Library and Information Science?
2. What do pre-service and in-service librarians think about their needs for ESP in Library and Information Science?

English for specific purposes
English for specific purposes (ESP) emerged from the field of ELT in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has been gaining traction since the 1970s. Hutchinson and Waters (1987) conceptualize ESP as "an approach to language learning, which is based on learner need" (p. 19). This means that ESP does not involve a particular kind of language, teaching material or methodology, but the foundation of ESP involves the learners, the language required and the learning context, which are based on the primacy of need in ESP. At present, ESP is considered as an important branch of ELT (Woodrow, 2018). Anthony (2018) describes ESP as follows: an approach to language teaching that targets the current and/or future academic or occupational needs of learners, focuses on the necessary language, genres, and skills to address these needs, and assists learners in meeting these needs through the use of general and/or discipline-specific teaching materials and methods. (pp. 10-11) As the main objectives and contents of any ESP courses are based on specific needs of the learners, ESP deals with preparing learners to be able to use English in academic, professional, or workplace settings (Basturkmen, 2014;Algofaili, 2019).

International perspectives on needs analysis in ESP
According to Flowerdew (2013, p. 235), NA is "the first stage in ESP course development, followed by curriculum design, materials selection, methodology, assessment, and evaluation" and is conducted to establish the what and the how of a course. Brown (2016) defines the term NA as "the systematic collection and analysis of all information used for defining and validating a defensible curriculum" (p. 4). As a result, NA has been given significant consideration in designing a particular course that serves a particular group's interests.
Over the years, extensive international literature has emphasized the importance of NA in ESP (Petraki & Khat, 2020;Smith et al., 2022). Ali and Salih (2013) explain that NA serves many purposes in ESP because of the three following reasons. First, NA provides a means of obtaining a wider input into the content, design, and implementation of a language program. Second, NA can be used in developing and setting up goals, objectives and contents for programs. Third, NA can provide data for reviewing and evaluating the existing programs. Therefore, it is very important for teachers to begin NA with the targeted group of students before determining the exact content. In addition, NA connects the present students' academic needs with their needs in their prospective employment, so it should be considered as an indispensable aspect of ESP syllabus design. NA involves not only the students but also all stakeholders in the educational system and suitable companies and institutions that ultimately employ students. Hyland (2019) also emphasizes the importance of NA in ESP by stating that 'It is a crucial link between perception and practice, helping ESP to keep its feet on the ground by tempering any excesses of academic theory building with practical applications' (p. 339).
Although there are many different approaches to NA in the field of ELT, this current research employed the Dudley-Evans and St. John's (1998) model of NA because of its comprehensive description and effectiveness (Li, 2014). The model encompasses the following components: professional information about learners; their personal information; their English language information such as what their current language skills and language use; the learners' lacks or the gap between English language information of the learners and their professional communication information; language learning information; professional communication information; what is wanted from the course; and information about the setting in which the course would be run. In this model, Dudley-Evans and St.

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 127  John (1998) introduce three prominent aspects of NA: Target Situation Analysis (TSA), Present Situation Analysis (PSA), and Learning Situation Analysis (LSA). Particularly, TSA is considered as a kind of NA which mainly focuses on students' needs at the end of a language course. PSA refers to "the gap between what students are able to do with language at the beginning of the course and what they need to do at the end of the course" (Flowerdew, 2013, p. 326). In general, TSA is concerned with "needs" while PSA addresses learners "lacks" and "wants" (Flowerdew, 2013, p. 327). As explained by Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998), LSA comprises subjective, felt and processoriented needs. LSA refers to effective ways of learning the skills and language as well as the reason why learners want to learn. These authors confirm that process-oriented needs originate from the learning situation.
Grounded in the three fundamental components of exploring language needs: TSA, PSA and LSA, this study aimed to investigate the needs for ESP of pre-service and in-service librarians in order to develop a detailed needs profile. The findings from this study help to shed light on what course designers and language instructors need to focus on so that relevant adjustments to the English for LIS courses could be put into practice in the future.

Research design
A quantitative study was designed to collect data regarding the needs for ESP of pre-service and in-service librarians in the field of LIS. In order to achieve the objectives of the research and to answer the two research questions, questionnaires were used. A series of one-way ANOVAs were conducted to compare different needs for ESP among the groups of participants.

Participants
Two major groups of participants (N=185), pre-service librarians and in-service librarians, participated in this study (see Table 1). The group of 148 pre-service librarians was in their first, second and third year from the Department of Library and Information Science at Sun University. Their age ranged from 18 to 25. All of them (100%) had studied English for seven to nine years in middle and high schools by the time this study was conducted. This group of pre-service librarians was divided into two subgroups: 73 students (39.5%) who had taken an English for LIS course (+ESP) and 75 students (40.5%) who had never taken this course (-ESP). There were two reasons for choosing these two subgroups of students. The first reason is that these participants who had been in the LIS program and taken an ESP course for at least two semesters were expected to value the English language needs of their specialized discipline more highly than those who had not. The second reason is that the researcher also aims to explore different perceptions of the needs for ESP between the students with and without ESP experience.
The group of 37 in-service librarians was from 23 to 48 years old. Their years of work experience ranged from 1 to 24. These participants were chosen to participate in the study because they had been working in many different positions in the main and branch libraries at Sun University with diverse work experience in the field of LIS. As a result, they could fully express their ESP needs for their academic as well as occupational purposes.

. Materials
The questionnaires designed for this study conformed to the common principles of designing questionnaires in second language research (Dörnyei & Taguchi, 2010). These authors propose that the questionnaires should not exceed a 30-minute completion limit and its optimal length is three to four pages. As a result, the questionnaires in this research consisted of four pages and were designed to answer within 15 minutes.

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 128  Drawing on the three fundamental components of exploring language needs: Target Situation Analysis (TSA), Present Situation Analysis (PSA) and Learning Situation Analysis (LSA) (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998), two versions of the questionnaire were designed: one for the pre-service librarians and the other for the in-service librarians. Both versions are divided into two main parts and differ only in Part One. Part One of the pre-service librarians' questionnaire consists of 6 items dealing with background information: age, gender, educational background and the frequency of ESP use in the study program. However, Part One of the in-service librarians' questionnaire includes 9 items in relation to background information of librarians such as age, gender, workplace, job title, years of work experience, educational background and the frequency of ESP use at their workplace. Part Two of the two sets of questionnaires is made up of 36 closed-ended questions followed by a five-point Likert scale ranging from Not important at all to Very important. Those closed-ended questions aim at exploring information on the extent of the perceived importance of and needs for the four English language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing).
In this current research, the original versions of the questionnaires were designed in English by the researcher and then translated into Vietnamese by a senior English language lecturer. That was to make sure that the participants would be able to understand every word in the questionnaires, so they would not meet any difficulties in providing reliable data. Afterwards, it was back-translated by one English language teacher who had been teaching English at a Vietnamese university. The purpose of this back-translation procedure is to confirm the accuracy of the questionnaire.

Procedures
First of all, a pilot survey was carried out to check the reliability and validity of the questionnaires. Fifteen preservice librarians and five in-service librarians volunteered to complete the piloting paper-based questionnaires. Copies of the questionnaires in both languages, English and Vietnamese, were administered so that the participants could choose which language they wanted to read depending on their levels and preferences. The participants did not meet any difficulties in responding to the questionnaires, except for some minor misunderstandings in translation. All questions were said to be easy to understand, clear, and cohesive. After piloting the questionnaires, the authors made essential modifications to avoid vague wording and unfamiliar terms.
The questionnaire for pre-service librarians was administered on paper. The researcher visited six classes and asked the lecturers who were teaching at the Department of Library and information science in Sun University for permission to use about half an hour of their class time to administer the questionnaire. At the same time, the questionnaire for in-service librarians was also distributed on paper to in-service librarians. Before completing the questionnaires, the participants were asked to read and sign the consent form. Besides, the questionnaires were also anonymous to encourage honesty and willingness from the participants.

Analysis
First, the participants' responses to the 36 closed-ended items from the two sets of questionnaires were fed into SPSS version 28.0. Cronbach's alpha consistency analysis was used to verify the reliability of those items. Internal consistency reliability of the questionnaire is very high (r = .96). Besides, the collected data were analyzed quantitatively using a series of one-way ANOVAs to compare the differences between groups of participants and post-hoc Tukey's tests to specifically identify where the difference was located.

The importance of ESP in Library and Information Science
To have an overall understanding of the participants' perceptions of the importance of ESP, the responses to the 36 closed-ended items in the questionnaire were averaged and simplified by collapsing the original 5-point scale (not important at all, slightly important, neutral, important, and very important) into a 3-point scale (unimportant, neutral, and important).
In general, the results in Table 2 show that the importance of the four skills in ESP was highly regarded by all three groups of participants. More specifically, speaking was ranked as important by the highest number of the participants (84.3%), followed by reading (82.7%), listening (80.5%), and writing (75.7%). Interestingly, between the two groups with an approximately equal number of participants, the -ESP group (n = 75) seemed to appreciate the importance of ESP in the four language skills more highly than the +ESP group (n = 73).

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 129  The findings from this study demonstrate that both groups of pre-service and in-service librarians highly appreciated the importance of ESP. More specifically, most of the participants (84.3%) ranked speaking as the most important skill, followed by reading (with 82.7% of the participants), listening (80.5%) and writing (75.7%).
As pre-service and in-service librarians perceived their needs for the four language skills differently, the ESP curriculum designers and teachers should have careful consideration in designing relevant syllabi of the English for LIS courses that focus on all four language skills, with appropriate time allocation during the learning process. This result is consistent with that of the previous research by Mazdayasna & Tahririan (2008) as these researchers supported the view that students "greatly" need to increase their general English proficiency. Therefore, it could be understood that ESP is important for both pre-service and in-service librarians in their study and jobs.  Table 3 presents a summary of descriptive statistics concerning the ESP needs for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A general examination of the results shows that the needs for the four language skills of the three groups were rated pretty high with the lowest mean being 3.79. Note. -ESP = without ESP experience; +ESP = with ESP experience; +Work = with work experience In general, the -ESP group had the higher needs for listening, speaking, and writing than the +ESP and +Work groups, except for reading. Regarding the needs for listening, the mean value was lower in the +ESP group (M = 3.97, SD = .67) than in the -ESP group (M = 4.11, SD = .53) and the +Work group (M = 4.03, SD = .69). For speaking, the +ESP group had the lowest mean value (M = 4.00, SD = .71) while the -ESP and +Work groups had the higher means (M = 4.24, SD = .49, and M = 4.02, SD = .78, respectively). For reading, the +Work group had the highest mean (M = 4.13, SD = .62), but the -ESP and +ESP groups had lower means (M = 4.03, SD = .47, and M = 4.13, SD = .62). For writing, the +ESP and +Work groups had lower means (M = 3.83, SD = .70, and M = 3.79, SD = .76, respectively) than the -ESP group (M = 4.02, SD = .56). Interestingly, the -ESP group and the +Work group had higher means regarding the needs for listening, speaking and reading than the +ESP group, except for writing, in which the +Work group had the lowest needs (M = 3.79, SD = .76).

.2. The needs for ESP of pre-service and in-service librarians
The one-way ANOVA results in Table 4 reveal that there was a significant difference in the needs for reading, with F(2,182) = 4.62, p = .011. However, there were no significant differences in the ESP needs among the three groups of participants in terms of listening, F(2,182) = .95, p =.386, speaking, F(2,182) = 2. 60, p = .077 and writing, F(2,182) = 2.08, p = .127. As shown in Table 5, the Tukey HSD multiple comparisons located more specific differences in the needs for reading between the groups. Especially, the results further indicate that the needs for reading between the +ESP group (M = 3.81, SD = .66) and the +Work group (M = 4.13, SD = .62) were significantly different (p = .02), suggesting that the +Work group valued the reading skill significantly higher than the +ESP group.

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 131  Note. -ESP = without ESP experience; +ESP = with ESP experience; +Work = with work experience Because there were no significant differences among the three groups in the needs for ESP in terms of listening, speaking and writing as a whole, separate one-way ANOVA tests on each question item in every group of language skills were run to find out more specific results. Table 6 presents one-way ANOVA results on the participants' needs for listening sub-skills. There was no significant difference in the participants' perceived needs for some listening sub-skills among the three groups, except for Question 3, concerning the needs for listening skill to understand specialized seminars and workshops, F(2, 182) = 4.27, p = .015, and Question 4, dealing with the participants' needs for understanding job interviews, F(2, 182) = 13.54, p = .00. The Tukey HSD comparisons in Table 7 located more detailed differences on the needs for listening sub-skills among the three groups of participants. Particularly, the listening skill to understand specialized seminars and workshops was valued significantly higher by the +Work group (M = 4.03, SD = .69) than the +ESP group (M = 3.97, SD = .67). This could be explained that the in-service librarians had more opportunities to attend specialized seminars and workshops than the pre-service librarians. In addition, there were significant differences in the needs for understanding job interviews between the +ESP group and the +Work group (p =.00), and between the +Work group and the -ESP group (p =.00). It means that the needs for understanding job interviews of the -ESP group (M = 4.11, SD = .53) and the +ESP group (M = 3.97, SD = .67) were perceived to be significantly higher than those of the +Work group (M = 4.03, SD = .69).  Table 8 signify that the needs for speaking sub-skills of the three groups were quite similar, except for Question 11, investigating the participants' needs for speaking skill to answer job interviews, F(2, 182) = 11.73, p = .00. The results of Tukey's post hoc test in Table 9 further indicate that there were significant differences in the needs for speaking sub-skills between three groups of participants. Both the -ESP group (M = 4.24, SD = .49) and the +ESP group (M = 4.00, SD = .71) valued the needs for speaking skill to answer job interviews more highly than the +Work group (M = 4.02, SD = .78). Note. -ESP = without ESP experience; +ESP = with ESP experience; +Work = with work experience Concerning the needs for writing skill, Table 10 reveals that the participants' perceptions were significantly different among the three groups in terms of their needs for skills to write specialized term papers, reports or research papers (Q27), F(2, 182) = 4.11, p = .018, to write CVs and job applications (Q28), F(2, 182) = 12.30, p = .000, to translate specialized materials (Q34), F(2, 182) = 4.81, p = .009, and to summarize materials in cataloging (Q36), F(2, 182) = 3.84, p = .023. The Tukey HSD comparisons in Table 11 located more specific differences among the three groups of participants. More specifically, the -ESP group (M = 4.02, SD = .56) and the +ESP group (M = 3.83, SD = .70) had significantly higher needs for writing skills to write specialized term papers, reports or research papers, and writing CVs and job applications than the +Work group (M = 3.97, SD = .76). Furthermore, the -ESP (M = 4.02, SD = .56) and the +Work group (M = 3.97, SD = .76) confirmed the needs for writing skills to translate specialized materials and to summarize materials in cataloging more significantly than the +ESP group (M = 3.83, SD = .70). Note. -ESP = without ESP experience; +ESP = with ESP experience; +Work = with work experience The results from this study reveal that all the three groups of -ESP, +ESP and +Work did not show remarkable differences in their needs for listening, speaking, and writing, except for reading. In particular, the finding reveals that the +Work group valued the reading skill more significantly than the +ESP group. This finding concurs with those from earlier literature (Balaei & Ahour, 2018;Pazoki & Alemi, 2020) that among the four language skills, reading was the most important and highly needed skill. This finding suggests that course designers and language instructors give more focus on the reading skill in English for LIS courses in order to satisfy the learners' needs, and students should practice the reading skill to prepare them for the library jobs.
In general, the results from this study are congruent with the suggestion made by Ibrahim (2010): "ESP teachers should be aware of the matter and should not concentrate on teaching general English, but they have to satisfy their students' needs for the language in the different fields of specialization in order to use the language linguistically correct, verbally or on paper" (p. 202). It could be recommended that ESP instructors should be aware of the importance of needs analysis to collect information on the specific needs and wants from pre-service, in-service librarians as well as other stakeholders so that instructors could recognize the clear objectives of the targeted core courses and determine the appropriate content. The evidence from this study also demonstrates that the participants from the three groups considered English as necessary for their job-related activities. This finding is consistent with those of previous research (Ahmmed et al., 2020;Arias-Contreras & Moore, 2022). These studies confirmed that English plays a vital role in professional settings. It is evident that English is very important for both groups of preservice and in-service librarians in order to develop their professional expertise. Therefore, both general English courses and English for LIS courses should start in the first year of university so that students could have more opportunities to learn English.