Acceso usuarios
Marcela de Oliveira Santos Silva
Portuguese language instruction is relevant to global businesses, diplomacy, security, and environmental affairs, yet it accounted for only 0.7% of total world language enrollments at universities in the United States in 2016. As part of an attempt to promote enrollments in Portuguese at an American public research institution with a top-rated business school, this task-based needs analysis aims to inform the restructuring of this institution’s Portuguese for Business course into a task-based curriculum. For this purpose, I conceptually replicate Serafini and Torres’s (2015) and Martin and Adrada-Rafael’s (2017) Business Spanish needs analyses, as there are no previously published Portuguese for Business task-based needs analyses in the United States. In addition to a systematic investigation of task frequency and perceived difficulty, the current needs analysis includes an assessment of the viability of implementing a reconfigured Portuguese for Business course whose previous version has not been offered since 2008. The results indicate that the reimplementation is viable if the course is offered in preparation for a business school’s course that has a study abroad component. The needs analysis also generated a set of 33 target tasks that will provide a basis for the new curriculum and inform the course objectives and the design of future pedagogic tasks.
