This presentation reports the partial results of a Master's study which applied a needs analysis to establish the target communicative situations of adult immigrant learners of Brazilian Portuguese as a Host Language, which lasted for about five months and comprised classroom observation, interview sessions with teachers, assistants, and learners.
Long (2015) states that TBLT "require[s] an investment of resources in a needs analysis" (p. 7) to establish learners' communicative needs, in order to result in the production "of materials appropriate for a particular population of learners" (Long, 2015, p.7). This presentation focuses on the needs analysis phase of a Master's research which aimed at establishing the communicative needs of an adult immigrant population of learners of Portuguese as a Host Language in a free course at a public university in the south of Brazil as the starting point to design, and subsequently, implement, in an intact classroom, cycles of tasks according to the target situations raised by the needs analysis which took about five months, comprising observations, interview sessions with the teacher and teaching assistants, and with the students (individually and in groups), aided by an interpreter considering students' beginner level in Portuguese. All interviews were transcribed and went through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to grasp the situations of communication students mentioned the most, which revealed that learners have great difficulty accessing situations of communication in the target language, which reinforces Long's (2015) proposition that the specific population of the so-called involuntary language learners are many times "marginalized and living in a linguistic ghetto" (p.4). However, when target situations of Portuguese use were addressed during the interviews ten main contexts of communication emerged, from which the five most mentioned were: to find work, to give/understand directions/locations, to buy objects (mainly at the supermarket), to communicate at school/at home (the Portuguese course and with neighbors and/or landlords respectively). The analysis of the teacher's and assistants' answers also revealed similar target situations, which again supports what researchers, such as Grosso (2010), have already discussed about the situations in which these immigrants are mainly affected when displaced to other countries.
