Due to the increasing social relevance caused by the graying of the society, language courses especially for adults are getting more and more important. The necessity of treating this issue scientifically is urgent and has experienced too less attention. Since Albert Raasch (2013) has put it up for discussion, nothing really happened. This paper is supposed to take the initial step into that direction in order to create suited offerings for that specific target group of adult learners. Special

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... idactical concepts are required for elder adults. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation of the relevant characteristics of elder learners and their needs has to be provided. This paper attempts to show one possibility of how the target group of elder adults as language learners can be investigated. It is of utmost importance to find their specific learning motives, learning difficulties and learning strategies. This paper can be seen as a pilot study, which aims to show a possible way of investigating those characteristics. The intention is to find out more about the specific characteristics of elder learners by means of the method of investigating subjective theories.