EAP plays a highly important role in countries where English is used mainly for academic purposes. However, EAP programs have been developed without conducting a systematic needs analysis from both the students’ and instructors’ perspective. The purpose of this study is to describe the perception that EAP students and instructors have of the problematic areas in EAP programs. A total of 693 EAP...

Current tools for multidisciplinary teams in user-centered software engineering (UCSE) provide little support for the different approaches of the various disciplines in the project team. Although multidisciplinary teams are getting more and more involved in UCSE projects, an efficient approach to communicate clearly and to pass results of a user needs analysis to other team members without loss...

* Adnan Tahir is an Assistant Professor (Humanities) at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Wah, Pakistan. He has a vast experience of teaching English as a Second Language, Technical & Research Writing and Business Communication at various levels, along with the experience as a teacher trainer. His research interests include teacher socialization and professional development, English ...

Scenario-based User Needs Analysis or SUNA is a method for envisioning, clarifying and refining ideas for developing software products and services usually where there are two or more parties involved. Its strengths lie in the elicitation and analysis of user needs encapsulated in ‘day in the life of’ style scenarios, and the management of collaboration. The use of a workshop based process comb...

The development of the rule of law in states at risk, like Pakistan, is significantly important in the context of war against terrorism: Pakistan has a dire need to transform its society. Pakistan is a common law country, therefore English is the language of law. However, most law students and recent law graduates do not have adequate competence in legal English. This results in a variety of pr...

Many non-native English speaking (NNES) graduates are required to write academic papers in English; consequently, recent research in the past decade has been devoted to investigating the usefulness of genrebased Writing Instructions (GBWI) on learners’ writing cultivation. There is little specific guidance, however, on how GBWI can be employed in online learning environments. The study aimed to...

This paper reports on how knowledge audit analysis was conducted for special children (SC) communities in Malaysia context. The purpose of the knowledge audit is to determine the knowledge requirement of SC communities which may reveal the required, available and missing knowledge and the person involved related to SC. Four communities of practice (CoPs) have been identified namely Parents, Edu...

IT infrastructure implementation projects have to deal with many uncertainties and risks. A favourable implementation strategy therefore needs to reduce uncertainties and risks with regard to the IT infrastructure investment. The complexity in these type of decisions relates to the fact that different types of uncertainties and risks and quantitative and qualitative information need to be incor...

Most existing studies on technology training address the operational issues of training process (e.g., training needs assessment, learning, delivery methods, etc.). The strategic concerns of IT training for enhancing business productivity largely are not addressed by the current literature. In this article, we explore the strategic concerns of IT training in hierarchical organizations, which ar...