The study is a descriptive survey which enables researchers “to count; when they cannot count every one, it counts a representative sample and then makes inferences about the population as a whole” (Oppenheim, 1996: p. 8 cited in Ababio, 2009 ). A major advantage of the descriptive survey is its potential to provide researchers with a lot of information obtained from quite a large sample of individuals. The design is, therefore, useful in the present study because we aimed at ascertaining difficulties learners of CS encounter in order to surmount them through best interventionist programmes and revised course content.

The total population of students that offered CS in the 2010/2011 academic year stood at 4083 (UCC Student Records and Management Information Section, 2010). Following Cohen, Manion and Morrison’s (2000) typology for determining a sample size, we obtained an accessible population of 240 participants drawn from all the faculties. They comprised 120 first year CS students and 120 second, third and fourth year undergraduate students. Twenty lecturers who teach CS were selected out of a total of forty-five on the basis of their willingness to participate in the study.

The sample size was obtained, using a two-pronged sampling method. First, a simple random sampling was done in order to guarantee fairness of representativeness and the validity of results (Fraenkel & Wallen, 2000; Cresswell, 2003) . Participants were then selected based on stratified sampling technique. Thus, 30 students were selected from all the faculties and schools (i.e. School of Medical Sciences and School of Agriculture ) of the university. Besides, the selection reflected gender representativeness, comprising 15 males and 15 females.

Two sets of questionnaire (Appendix) were administered. The first and second sought to sample the views of CS students and CS lecturers respectively on the relevance, course components of the programme, and whether Communicative Skills should be taught based on students’ programmes of study. These instruments were useful because they were amenable to statistical computations given the relatively large sample size of the study (Fraenkell & Wallen, 2000) . Further, the questionnaire has proven to be handy in needs analysis research (Richards, 2001; Ababio, 2009) . The questionnaires comprised both closed-ended and open ended questions which were constructed on the Likert scale. The open-ended questions enabled respondents to express their views on issues which they hardly could convey in close-ended questions. A Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient of 0.819 and 0.817 were obtained for the students’ and lecturers’ questionnaires respectively.

The mixed method of data analysis, quantitative and qualitative paradigms, was employed. As a form of methodological triangulation, this method of analysing data strengthens the validity of results (Cresswell, 2003) . Inferential statistics was mainly used as a rigorous statistical package to reveal statistically significant differences or otherwise of elements under comparison. This method was supported by qualitative content analysis with the view to supply a detailed description of a point made.

Available evidence shows that out of a sample size of two hundred and sixty (made up of 240 students and 20 lecturers), 240 of them responded of which 91.7% were students while the remaining were lecturers. Of this number, the first year students accounted for 120 while the continuing students also totalled 120. Figure 1 depicts the gender distribution of the respondents.

The figure below shows a greater percentage of females (53%) compared than males (43%), thus indicating a difference of six percent. This difference was, however, not marginal to favour former over the latter in the analysis of the data. In addition, the educational background of respondents was also sought in order to understand the kind of educational training they had had. Figure 2 presents these results.

It can be seen from Figure 2 that an overwhelming majority (84.5%) of the students gained admissions into the University of Cape Coast (UCC) with the West African Examination Council’s (WAEC)² Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE/WASSCE) while only 5.5% entered UCC with Higher National Diploma (HND) in diverse fields of study.

Table 1 shows the frequency and percentage distribution of respondents vis-à-vis their faculties or schools. From the table, it is clear that more than forty percent of participants (40.5%) offered education while less than fourteen percent of the respondents for both Business students (13.6%) and Social Sciences (13.6%). It should be noted that these percentage distributions comprise both first year and continuing students, and that the disparities resulted from irretrievable questionnaires though not anticipated.

Table 2 contains responses of first year (Level 100) student respondents on their Communicative Skills’ needs. With a mean average value of 3.68, respondents strongly agreed that Communicative Skills (CS) is relevant to university students’ education while 3.66 each of them indicated that CS is important to students because it enables them to correct their grammatical errors. Again, an overwhelming majority (94.6%) of them were positive that CS equips students with a large vocabulary. This observation is reminiscent of Dzameshie’s (1997) claim the Communicative Skills is indispensable to university education. The relevance of Communicative Skills obtained an overall mean value of 3.5. This value underscores the point that students really appreciated the importance of Communicative skills to their education.

In respect of which course components are most useful to CS students, 86.4% of the respondents agreed that concord, dangling modification and ambiguity are the most useful components of the Communicative Skills programme. This concession rated an average value of 3.33. With the lowest mean of 2.71, 36.6% of the Level 100 students claimed that Basic Sentence Patterns is the most useful component of the programme. Indeed, the views of respondents are in tandem with Afful’s (2007) conviction that CS students still believe that some components of the programme are no more useful. On the question of whether the teaching of the programme should be discipline-specific, it was observed that a 2.8 mean value was obtained. This means that respondents hardly agreed to this view, perhaps because they are less knowledgeable of its pedagogical significance.

The study also sought to investigate whether there exist any significant differences between the needs of Level 100 CS students and continuing (Level 200, 300 and 400) students. An independent sample t-test was run and the results are contained in Table 3.

From Table 3, it can be seen that only one significant result was realised on skills of note making and note taking such as skimming, scanning and outlining as the most useful components of the Communicative Skills programme. This means that first year students and continuing students had different views with regards to whether these skills are the most useful components of the programme. Generally, there were no statistically significant differences on the remaining 24 items. It can therefore, be concluded on the basis of the majority of

respondents that there was no significant difference between the needs of first year students and continuing students in Communicative Skills.

Further, an ANOVA test was run to determine whether there exist any significant differences among students’ Communicative Skills needs based on their faculties and schools. Table 4 contains the statistically significant results.

In all, the students across the various faculties and schools differed on only four (4) items out of the 25 constituting 16%. For instance, there was no universal agreement among respondents from the various faculties and schools with regards to whether CS is important to students. They also expressed varied perceptions as to whether or not Communicative Skills is really meeting students’ communicative needs. Again, the students from the various faculties and schools differed in their responses on whether or not reading and listening are the most important components of the programme. The lack of concession in students’ responses shows that they tacitly do not support a programme-specific teaching approach.

Table 5 presents the views of lecturers of Communicative Skills. The table reveals that lecturers generally agreed that CS is a still a relevant programme of study. While the majority of lecturers (60.0%) strongly agreed to the claim, 40.0% of them simply agreed. All of them (100.0%) were also positive that CS is relevant to education. Interestingly, the lecturers, however, assigned an average rate (lowest) of 2.21 to the view that Communicative Skills equips students with a large vocabulary. Clearly, the low value means that the lecturer respondents did not highly appreciate the importance and relevance of Communicative Skills programme in the University.

With regards to whether such writing skills as paragraph and essay writing are the most useful components of the programme, a least mean value of 2.78 was obtained. This observation is rather worrying in the sense that it is generally believed that a writing course like CS should enhance learners’ writing skills because “students usually produce many kinds of writing: notes during class sessions, written assignments, term papers…” (Biber & Conrad, 2009: p. 1) . Nonetheless, they seem to endorse the remediational concept of Communicative Skills that the primary objective of Communicative Skills is to correct students’ grammatical errors. This is because their responses rated an average low value of 1.95.

Further, unlike their students, the majority of the lecturers (70%) agreed that Communicative Skills should be taught according to students’ specific programmes of study. This view attracted an average value of 3.15. In other words, lecturers felt that different course contents and methods of delivery should be adopted in teaching students from such disciplines as Medical Sciences, Education or the Humanities. Such a need is crucial because contemporary research in student pedagogy now emphasises a variationist approach to teaching more than a generalist perspective (Dillon, 1991; MacDonald, 1994; Afful, 2005) . As Afful (2007) argues, “Disciplines revolve around certain phenomena in the construction of knowledge” (p. 149).

Below is catalogued some views expressed by both students and lecturers on the relevance of Communicative Skills to university education and the world of work. An interesting revelation from Table 6 indicates that both