United States Department of State Foreign Service officers are usually required to learn a language spoken in the country of their onward diplomatic position. Their primary objective is functional ability to do their jobs using the target language. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) trains (a) diplomats (e.g., consular affairs, public diplomacy, management, and political or economic officers) and (b) specialists (e.g., diplomatic security, information technology, financial management, and general services) in more than sixty languages. We derived this case study from FSI’s Spanish tradecraft curriculum developed with and for specialist officers, who are Diplomatic Security (DS) agents. About half of all FSI Spanish students are returning students, already experienced at their jobs, needing to learn Spanish for their next onward post. The other half typically are entry-level officers and first-time language learners, who preferably attend FSI’s introductory tradecraft training in English before enrolling in Spanish.

Introduction

In 2002, a research team at the University of Hawai'i's National Foreign Language Resource Center (UH NFLRC) completed a threeyear, federally funded pilot project on a task-based approach to the teaching of Korean as a foreign language (KFL). The project covered all six components in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) program (Doughty & Long, 2002; Long, 2000; Long & Norris, 2000): needs analysis; syllabus design; materials development; methodology and pedagogy; testing; and evaluation. Deliverables from the project included instruments and procedures for each component in both Korean and English, the latter intended as models for potential use in the teaching of other commonly and less commonly taught languages. This paper describes Stage 1 of the project, completed in the academic year 1999–2000: a task-based analysis of learners' target language needs, along with an illustration of the use of target discourse samples, collected as part of the needs analysis, in a module of task-based teaching materials. While some data are presented from the Korean study, the emphasis throughout is a practical demonstration of one process by which a task-based needs analysis (NA) can be carried out for any tertiary foreign language program. Since it was not the intention of the project at this time to develop an entire curriculum, only a selection of identified target needs was focused on to develop prototype taskbased instruction.