Abstract Needs analysis is regarded as a crucial and important step in any educational course design since it can help teachers and materials developers to design a course attuned to the needs of the learners. Considering this important issue, the current study attempted to investigate the language needs of MA, BA, and PhD students at the University of Mazandaran, Iran. A questionnaire was administered to 301 students of which 164 students were in BAlevel, 70 students in MAlevel,and 65 students in PhD level (two missing data). The questionnaire was adopted from Kormos et al. (2002), which consisted of 50 items in English language.The questionnaire was translated into Farsi and piloted with a sample of participants similar to those in our main study. Then, it was validated by think-aloud interviews and its reliability was ensured(r > 0.7). It comprises 50 questions about the frequency of situations of English language use that the participants felt they need to cover, and answered on a five-point likertscaleformat( Never to Always). Using SPSS software, the students’ responses were computer-coded and analyzed. The results showed that the language needs in academic situations steadily increased by the increase in the educational level of the students whereas the BA participants’ need wasfound to berelated to the private situation. Regarding language need situations in professional domain, it was found that the most frequent situation was in the professions not related to teaching such as reading public documents, reading business letters, reading business documents, and translating business documents. Furthermore, the results indicated that there were significant differences between the language needs of BA students and those of MA and PhD students and also between the language needs of MA students and PhD students while no significant difference was found between the language needs of BA students and MA students. The analysis on difference among domains in three educ
