This article reports on observations made during an intensive course in French organized by a business firm for its immigrant Portuguese workers. The principal aim of this project was to study course materials as they are actually used. Special attention was therefore paid to: (1) teacher discourse, which, although an essential component of classroom methodology, does not in fact appear in the pedagogical materials; (2) learner discourse, which is a useful indication of the relevance of the course materials to the learners' actual needs; and (3) the proportion of teacher-talk versus learner-talk, since this plays an important role in making efficient any course based on the acquisition of responses. A striking observation was the way in which the course, which was basically oral to begin with, concentrated more and more on the written language. This was due to the fact that the workers wished to improve their chances of promotion and this meant acquiring the relevant communicative skills, in this case, reading and writing skills. This caused problems for the teachers, who were not prepared to adjust their pedagogical practices to their students' demands, and fell back on traditional methodology. Thus a methodology needs to be developed which takes into account the communicative needs of workers. (Author/AM)