IDENTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ NEEDS IN READING: THE CASE OF ALGERIAN ELP MASTER’S STUDENTS AT TLEMCEN UNIVERSITY

Nowadays, English is the language of official institutions, law courts, local and central governments, and education. It is also the language of large commercial and industrial organisations. With the opening of the Algerian market to the world economy, English has become more needed by a specific group of the society, aiming at communicating with foreigners. Students of Law and Political Sciences are considered as an important segment of the Algerian society because they are the representatives of the Algerian government. For this reason English courses are provided to Master’s students in the Faculties of Law and Political Sciences. The aim behind such courses is to help students to acquire knowledge of the English language to achieve specific academic and professional tasks. However, despite all the efforts done by ELP teachers, students still display a low proficiency level in English, because both the present and the former students are not able to extract information from the literature related to their speciality, i.e., they are not effective readers of the English language used in legal context. It seems, then, urgent for the researcher to investigate at this level by analysing the occupational and academic English reading needs of Law students and propose pedagogical solutions by undertaking a case study of Master’s students at Tlemcen University. Hence, this study is an attempt to guide ELP teachers to design an ELP course that fulfils students’ academic requirements, and to help ELP students to use appropriate techniques when reading legal texts.