I will report on work in progress with Radhika Ganapathy. One wishes to study irreducible smooth' complex representations of symplectic and (split) orthogonal groups over local function fields, i.e., fields of the form F_q((t)). The theory of close local fields’ proposes to do this by studying the representation theory of these groups over (varying) finite extensions of Q_p. We will discuss an approach to using this philosophy to study the local Langlands correspondence for these groups.