Audience Analysis for Foreign-Language Education

This paper discusses the concept of audience analysis for foreign-language education. The fì.rst of its three main sections is devoted to an informal defìnition of the concept and a discussion of its potential application to a wide range of problems. The second section deals specifìcally with ten major variables or parameters that should fìgure in an audience analysis for foreign-language education. The variables proposed here are the learners l)age, 2) aptitude, 3)attitude, 4)interests, 5)purpose, 6) personality, 7)cognitive style, 8)fì.rst language, 9)sex, and 10)experience as a foreign language learner. The third section shows how the proposed ten-variable audience analysis can be used in dealing with various aspects of foreign-language education such as l)construction and/or selection of text materials or drills, 2)selection of teaching methods, and 3) treatment of the learner's errors. The proposed audience analysis is shown to suggest some interesting refìnements in the theories of contrastive as well as error analysis