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HEIDEMARIE HAIDER ibw-Forschungsbericht 143 | Fremdsprachen für die Wirtschaft
Table 3: Which types of texts do you have to read in your job? (Reading NEEDS)
If you need to write the following in the target language, you find it easy/troublesome/
difficult (Reading DEFICIENCIES)
Source: Haider 2004
Product descriptions, manuals, trade journals, repair instructions, and web pages are the students’
training priorities – texts where they gain information about the products they sell.
Technical books are next on the list, not because they are especially important, or because students
need to read them often, but because learners find it extremely difficult to deal with extensive
texts of this type. Forms also have a high training priority. Order forms, invoices, and taxfree
forms are quite common in shops, even in the target language. E-mails and text messages
also show a high need, but, as students find it easy to deal with these sorts of text (degree of
deficiency), the training priority is rather low.
3.4 Strategy Analysis
Nunan (1990: 18) underpins the importance of strategy analysis by stating:
In recent years, the incorporation into curriculum development of information about the subjective
needs of learners, relating to their perceptions of what they want to learn and how they want
to learn it, has added an important dimension to needs analysis and obviated some of the criticisms
made of earlier more mechanistic approaches.
Therefore, the same students were asked, in addition to the target and deficiency analysis, how
they would like to improve their knowledge of English. The results can be seen in Table 4.
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