Students tend to have a pretty concrete idea of why they are learning English. Sometimes, you will need to help them nail it down a bit and make their goals SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound), but most people know what they want from English.
Dealing with soft goals
You'll encounter students that have softer goals. They are less sure why they are studying English, and have less clear ideas about where they are heading or what they need.
You can get some goals from them through a smooth conversation.
Here's the strategy in the form of a dialogue. It's a bit long, but it works.
Teacher: “Ok, so let’s imagine you study English, for one or two years. When you sound better, smoother, where will you use English?
Student: “Business meetings, mainly.”
T: “Ok, will you give your opinion, and ask questions?”
S: “Yes, both.”
T: “Great. So right now, do you do business meetings?”
S: “Yeah, but I can’t understand everything.”
T: “Ok, so first we need to work on your listening, so that you can understand everything. So, what kind of things do you want to talk about in business meetings?
S: I need to talk about (whatever specific thing they need to talk about. Finances maybe.)T: Great. We can work on that. Any other places you’ll use English? ..travel? ..e-mail?
S: E-mail is OK, I always use the same phrase. I will travel on business, and my wife wants to go to Hawaii.
T: Ah, a lot of ladies love Hawaii. Does she want to go shopping there?
S: Yes! She wants to go shopping.
T: Do you want to go shopping?
S: No I don’t.
T: So you don’t like shopping. I see. Yeah, my wife loves shopping. It’s tiring.
S: Exactly.
T: Will you use English when you are traveling?
S: Yeah, but hotels are OK.
T: Maybe you can help your wife shopping, or help her if she has trouble.
S: Yeah, sometimes I have trouble with native speakers. Once I asked for ginger at a sushi restaurant in America and they gave me ginger ale, the drink. I think they didn’t understand my pronunciation.
T: OK, pronunciation is important. We can help you with that. Ok, so, to review, in business meetings you need to listen to native speakers, give opinions, ask questions, and we should practice pronunciation.
S: Yes, exactly.
You can then turn these more concrete ideas of a student's wishlist into some strategies goals for their study plan in their assessment.
From the above conversation, you might suggest that the student do pronunciation practice for ten minutes a day, three times a week for a month.
You can also recommend working on a business book to help them cope with meetings and practice the various kinds of meetings that they might have (formal presentations, brainstorming sessions, planning meetings etc.)