This presentation will report on an Irish primary school that successfully converts extreme linguistic diversity into significant educational capital. It will argue that pupils’ learning achievement illuminates three theoretical constructs – exploratory talk, plurilingual and intercultural education, and learner autonomy – while suggesting possibilities of mutually beneficial collaboration between teachers and researchers.
Task-based needs analysis is a professional, in-depth enquiry into the precise language and communication needs of a community. Task-based needs analysis uses tasks as the organizing principle and aims at informing task design in such a way that it achieves maximum efficiency in the face of limited time and resources. This is particularly the case for migrant populations that need to perform tasks under enormous pressure, such as heightened expectations to integrate quickly and function socially, preserve citizenship or residency, or to avoid refusal of entry or even deportation. Additionally, an insufficiently addressed issue in TBLT is that of transferring what we learn from needs analysis to actual task design. This is especially true about migrant populations for whom crucial aspects of task design may have life-changing consequences. The aim of this talk is three-fold. Firstly, the basic principles of task-based need analysis will be briefly discussed and issues of particular relevance to migrant communities will be highlighted. Secondly, the talk will analyze the dimensions that are typically addressed during needs analysis (task descriptions and procedures; task features and task complexity; participants and spatial settings; pragmatic and discursive dimensions; psychosocial aspects; competences, attitudes and values dimension; linguistic dimension; performance standards, among others) and will point out additional dimensions which may be particularly relevant to migrant communities (aspects such as agency or self-regulation). In the third place, the talk will focus on examples of the interesting and growing body of work done on task-based needs analyses for adult migrant populations and will highlight crucial gaps and potential future directions in the field.
