Assessing target skills in real-life settings has become popular in discussions on how to teach languages for specific purposes. Nevertheless, empirically sound curricular are still a rare exception. With language needs analysis and language usage analysis the paper gives an overview on the two common approaches dominating these disussions. As we argue for combining these approaches, in this article we present a model that shows both approaches as a first step in creating an empirical basis for curriculum development. As a second and additional step, we point out the opportunities of text linguistics and discourse analysis. A special focus lies on methodological aspects in collecting and analyzing data, as well as on a discussion of the quality of the findings each approach leads to.