A Task-Based Needs Analysis of English for Nursing: Insights from Indonesia

Needs analysis is an important component of Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), yet relatively few TBLT studies report Task-Based Needs Analysis (TBNA). Existing TBNA research is largely dominated by Global North settings and has rarely demonstrated how needs analysis outcomes are systematically used to design pedagogic tasks. In Indonesia, TBNA remains rare, and the lack of systematic needs analysis continues to be a major challenge in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practice. Therefore, this study addresses these gaps by conducting a TBNA of Indonesian inpatient nursing, an ethically sensitive and underrepresented context in the TBNA literature, and by illustrating how TBNA findings can inform pedagogic task design.

This study was conducted in a hospital in central Bali, Indonesia, and employed two research phases. Phase One focused on identifying inpatient nursing tasks, selecting crucial tasks, and investigating task-complexifying factors in inpatient nursing communication. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 21 inpatient nurses and a survey completed by 37 nurses. The analysis identified 12 main tasks and 48 associated subtasks. Two subtasks were prioritized as crucial because they combined high frequency and high perceived difficulty: informing patients about daily plans or treatments and listening to doctor-patient conversations during ward rounds. Patient-related factors, particularly patients’ conditions, emerged as the main sources of task complexity, with more serious conditions making English communication more challenging. Phase Two examined one crucial task, “Meeting a New Patient”, in greater depth. Six inpatient nurses participated in simulation role-plays with a simulated patient, followed by stimulated recall interviews to explore the dimensions of the task and sources of difficulty. The role-plays were also evaluated by two nursing lecturers and two English-for-nursing lecturers. This phase revealed a detailed task structure consisting of core, conditional, and optional subtasks, and further highlighted the central role of patient condition in shaping task complexity.

Overall, the study extends TBNA research to the underrepresented Indonesian inpatient nursing context. It also demonstrates how empirically grounded TBNA findings can be systematically translated into pedagogic task design.