The inclusion of “advanced language proficiency” in this Handbook is a first even as a concern for “advancedness” is hardly new. Two views of language have influenced existing research, particularly in the USA: an earlier cognitive, psycholinguistic “acquisition” orientation and a more recent social, “use” orientation. Concurrently, European scholarship pursued a blended, semantically, and textually oriented approach that focused on linguistic phenomena in inter-ethnic discourse and used a longitudinal methodology (e.g., Perdue, 1993). The two orientations have thus far not been linked. As a consequence, the field does not yet have a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical basis for understanding advanced language, much less advanced language use.
This section addresses past approaches and remaining challenges in terms of three interrelated themes: (1) probing the capacity for advanced second language (L2) proficiency, (2) describing L2 advanced proficiency, and (3) exploring a semiotic dimension for understanding advanced L2 performance.
While describing advanced L2 proficiency should have conceptual priority over understanding an adult learner's capacity for attaining it, applied linguistics initially focused on “capacity,” defining it cognitively and psycholinguistically. For a long time, this line of inquiry substituted for a description of advanced L2 performance abilities.
The critical period hypothesis and constraints on native-like L2 attainment. Specifically, a lively strand of inquiry proposed a critical period for language learning past which later (i.e., second) language learners, due to maturation roughly circumscribed by puberty, could no longer process linguistic stimuli in the fashion that enables earlier learners to reach ability levels associated with nativeness. Its strong version claimed a discontinuity in learning outcomes manifested either as a cessation of learning or a significant down-turn in the learning slope. The critical period hypothesis (CPH) initially arose in the 1960s within a cognitivist orientation toward the human language capacity, had a particularly lively period in the 1990s, but lingers to the present (DeKeyser, Chapter 27, this volume). Its core claims are most plausible when second language acquisition (SLA) research operates within a monolingual framework and recognizes L2 users’ shortcomings as defining L2 learning. Translating the CPH's theoretical position into empirically verifiable questions and pondering its real-life implications proved to be difficult (see DeKeyser, 2000 and the response by Bialystok, 2002). Nevertheless, the theory continued to highlight innate constraints even under favorable learning conditions and retained its theoretical tenets despite counter-evidence from successful L2 learners and, more important, successful L2 users.
For example, Bongaerts (1999) found that highly motivated learners with access to massive L2 input and intensive training in the perception and production of L2 speech sounds attained nativelike abilities even in pronunciation, an area predicted to be subject to strong maturational constraints. Similarly, a large-scale study by Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009) of Swedish learners of Spanish found a not insignificant subset passing for native speakers. Because a concurrently administered battery of tests with highly complex, cognitively demanding tasks showed none of the late learners performing in the native speaker range the authors concluded that “nativelike ultimate attainment of a second language is, in principle, never attained by adult learners” (p. 250). That position was taken although research also revealed that native-like performance was “much less common among child learners than has previously been assumed” (p. 250). Further ambivalences arose from research on age, an important aspect of the CPH, when it determined that factors independent of age, particularly socio-psychological, experiential, and instructional variables, influenced ultimate attainment (Moyer, 2004).
Fundamental for this research orientation is Chomsky's seminal distinction between a highly valued underlying competence and a considerably less relevant observable performance or use. Some researchers probing for underlying intuitions regarding grammar (e.g., Coppieters, 1987) established competence and performance as independent from each other while researchers espousing a use orientation (e.g., Piller, 2002) proposed that native-like performance was more appropriately described as a temporary, context-, audience-, and medium-specific phenomenon. Taking an even stronger counter-position, Herdina and Jessner (2002) altogether rejected Universal Grammar-inspired approaches and advocated a dynamic systems approach, particularly under the condition of learning several non-native languages.
Such variant stances raise at least these questions: (1) Exactly what constitutes native-like success in language learning when passing for a native speaker is deemed insufficient? (2) What legitimates privileging monolingual native performance over multilingual non-native performance, the foundation of critical period claims? (3) What is the theoretical and empirical value of invariable, rule-based notions of competence in light of the evident variability of language learning and language use, and the importance of learner agency in learning an L2 to very advanced levels? In time, such questions undermined long-held claims by exposing their often implicitly held, conceptually flawed and ethically and socially irresponsible notions of bilingualism (Birdsong, 2005). On that account, L2 learners should be valued as inherently multicompetent speakers: not only are they under “no obligation” to process and use language as native users do, they bring unique features to language use that deserve to be recognized as falling outside categories of native performance and judgments of deficits (Cook, 2008; Ortega, 2010).
Fossilization and stabilization in relation to advanced learning capacity. Related research investigated ultimate levels of attainment and fossilization (see also Han, Chapter 29, this volume) or, at least, stabilization in language acquisition. First proposed by Selinker (1972), the notion of a non-native like unchangeable end-state in grammatical learning rapidly gained acceptance in the field. However, as Long (2003) pointed out, the construct of fossilization is fundamentally flawed when research begins by assuming that it exists rather than first convincingly demonstrating the existence of the postulated phenomenon. Moreover, under stringent research requirements (e.g., selecting appropriate learners; collecting sufficient data over extended periods of time; referring to individual data rather than group means; and using stability/change measures rather than accuracy ranges), indisputable evidence becomes quite thin. Finally, because use of the term is unusually varied, Long concluded that “researchers would do better to focus on describing and explaining the well-attested phenomenon of stabilization” (p. 487) rather than postulating fossilization.
Grammatical categories and L2 ultimate attainment. By comparison with these cognitivist approaches, a number of European studies pursued a functional or meaning-oriented approach. Their goal was to understand the creation of knowledge in texts, their point of interest the role of language structure in that process, especially grammaticized formal categories of language (Carroll and Lambert, 2006; Carroll et al., 2000). Because these categories vary significantly across languages, differentiated research evidence can contribute insights both to the long-standing debate about the relationship between language and thought and to the nature of language learning to very advanced ability levels.
For example, following a perspective-driven semantic model of information organization, Carroll et al. (2000) investigated questions such as these: what do advanced L2 learners deem worthy of being reported, in what order do they provide information in the linear organization of speaking and writing, what perspective do they take, into what propositional units do they translate information, within which macro-genres, with what communicative goals? Related research focused on L2 event construal (von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003), the expression of time and place (von Stutterheim et al., 2003) and the expression of motion and duration, including bounded and unbounded events (von Stutterheim and Carroll, 2006).
These studies illuminated another well-known phenomenon: many advanced speakers can handle the L2 in seemingly flawless ways and yet prompt native speakers to comment that they “wouldn't put it that way.” For example, the textual organization of very advanced learners of L2 German with L1 English or Spanish backgrounds shows that “an object-based organization plays a central role in information structure in descriptions in English, whereas information is typically organized in spatial terms in German” (Carroll et al., 2000, p. 445). Taken together, the research seems to support the conclusion “that the central factor impeding the acquisitional process at advanced stages ultimately is grammatical in nature, in that learners have to uncover the role accorded to grammaticized meanings and what their presence, or absence, entails in information organization” (von Stutterheim and Carroll, 2006, p. 51).
That position shows strong affinity to cognitive semantics, which investigates how language organizes central conceptual domains: space and time, motion and location, causation and force interaction, and attention and viewpoint. It also echoes Slobin's (1996a) conclusions that languages learned in childhood provide “a subjective orientation to the world of human experience, and this orientation affects the ways in which we think while we are speaking” (p. 91, original emphasis). Finally, it tracks well with Slobin's observations (1996b) on the difficulty of translating texts from typologically different languages with their different functional resources for textual meaning-making. These resources are extraordinarily difficult to learn because they “cannot be explained by a single feature; they are determined by a coalition of grammaticized features” (Carroll and Lambert, 2006, p. 71), that is, they act variably across the strata of the lexicogrammatical system of a language, from morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, to discourse levels (see also Choi and Lantolf, 2008). As a result, if the notion of “transfer” is at all to be invoked, it should not be limited to syntactic phenomena but, for advanced learners in particular, should investigate the domain of information structure and information organization (Bohnacker and Rosén, 2008).
The previous discussion of learners’ capacity for learning a second language already included descriptors for advanced levels of ability. This section puts advanced proficiency directly in focus.
“Fluency” and advanced levels of proficiency. Non-technical treatments customarily refer to an advanced L2 speaker as “fluent,” thereby highlighting effortless and continuous performance. That emphasis also pervades language assessment where valued performances at any proficiency level and also at higher proficiency levels are described in terms of smooth and flowing execution. Much more technical understandings are associated with the work of Schmidt (e.g., 1992). While he, too, focused on temporal phenomena of fluency he positioned them within a number of well-researched psychological learning mechanisms, such as the contrast between automatic and controlled processing, the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge (the latter further refined in terms of knowledge compilation and fine tuning through generalization, discrimination, and strengthening), or in terms of various forms of memory-retrieval. For an automatic procedural skill like fluency, debate ultimately revolves around the importance of well-practiced instances vs. the assumption of increasingly skillful application of abstract rules. Both options were particularly prominently and productively investigated in conjunction with notions of planning with different tasks under different task conditions (e.g., Ellis, 2009; Foster and Skehan, 1996).
But fluency can also refer to proficiency in and of itself or to good management of the entire language code (Koponen and Riggenbach, 2000). Such broader understandings were proposed early on by Carroll (1968) who distinguished fluency by the levels of the system where it was operative: from word, to ideational, to expressional fluency. Researchers like Segalowitz (2000) added the notion of cognitive fluency as distinct from performance fluency in order to foreground “the efficiency of the operation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying performance” (p. 202). A critical position toward viewing competence as non-variable had earlier on been taken by Fillmore (1979). Among sources of fluency differences he identified features like knowledge of fixed linguistic forms; control of processes for creating new expressions (e.g., word formation, syntactic devices); differences in speakers’ habitual use of certain devices, as well as differential knowledge of the cognitive or semantic schemata for which the language has provided linguistic encodings; knowledge of the various interactional schemata for conversations and discourse schemata, and knowledge of the appropriateness of words, forms, or syntactic constructions to particular settings with their respective genres and registers (cf., pp. 94–98).
Such thinking was elaborated in a prominent article by Pawley and Syder (1983) that circumscribed language learning in terms of native-like selection and native-like fluency. Specifically, the authors differentiated clause-chaining behaviors, which string together relatively independent clauses, from clause-integrating behaviors, which require speakers to consider larger stretches of speech retrospectively and prospectively, therefore demanding certain levels of planning. As a result, they highlighted the role played by lexicalized sentence stems as a site where syntax, lexicon, individual processing demands, and social convention regarding language use as a cultural phenomenon intersect in larger units of salient meanings and language form.
Cognitively oriented theoretical and pedagogical treatments have frequently opposed fluency to accuracy and complexity, where all are interpreted as aspects of advancedness. Skehan (see Skehan and Foster, 2001) assumed attentional limitations in processing whereby L2 learners will engage in a trade-off between fluency on the one hand and accuracy and complexity on the other. By contrast, Robinson (2001) postulated a differentiation between resource-directing dimensions of complexity, which might increase attention to the code (and therefore foster learning of accurate morpho-syntax), and resource-depleting dimensions of tasks, which make additional demands, such as through removing prior knowledge support.
A recent special issue of Applied Linguistics (Housen and Kuiken, 2009) demonstrated the longevity and influence of that line of research, including notions of advancedness, even as it also uncovered serious theoretical and empirical limitations. These arise when its central constructs operate independently from each other, from individual users, and from specific contexts, and without a well-theorized longitudinal trajectory (Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Norris and Ortega, 2009).
Capturing advanced language performance: diverse practical approaches. In many educational contexts considerably less rigorous notions of advancedness have tended to dominate. Thus, collegiate foreign language programs in the USA regularly accord advanced status according to seat time to learners past the language requirement of three–four semesters. In effect, “more” and “better,” perhaps “longer,” more “complex” and “more fluent” use of grammar and lexicon become the privileged qualities of advanced speaking, reading, and writing abilities. Another route to specifying advanced ability levels is through assessment regimes, such as the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency guidelines (ACTFL, 1999), the Foreign Service Institute/Interagency Language Round Table (FSI/ILR) scale, and the Test of English as a Second Language (TOEFL). Here advancedness is captured by the relationship between cut-off scores or ratings and access to licenses (e.g., ACTFL Intermediate or Advanced Low for teacher licensure in many states in the USA), to job opportunities (e.g., the ILR professional ratings of 3 and above) or to educational opportunities in US higher education institutions (a score of 600 on the TOEFL). At the same time, their “use-in-context” approach remains general, almost commonsensical. Malone et al. (2003) demonstrate that public education may demand precise statements of learning outcomes and accountability, yet provides surprisingly little specification for advanced language performance. Remarkably, such tests not only tend to be one-shot and often one-sided determinations of language abilities, a problematic matter in and of itself (Shohamy, 2006); they make little reference to the concrete instructional programs for which they function as high-stakes gate-keeping events.
Describing advanced levels of proficiency in ESL/EFL contexts. By contrast, college-level ESL/EFL instructional programs in particular have expressed advancedness in highly contextualized terms, especially through the academic language abilities needed by international students who seek admission to undergraduate study; wish to pursue diverse disciplinary majors or minors; and engage in graduate study with its high performance demands in a range of spoken and written genres, including theses and dissertations, case studies reports in business, lab reports in science and engineering, interpretations of literary work in the humanities, or comparative policy analyses.
In that effort, EFL/ESL programs increasingly proposed curricular progressions and pedagogical activities based on needs analyses (e.g., Reid, 2001). These generally take a holistic approach regarding language use to be crucial for attaining advancedness, a stance that contrasts with the emphasis on discrete grammatical features that characterizes EFL instruction in many countries. From an initial interest in different modalities of use—listening, reading, speaking, and writing— (Belcher and Hirvela, 2001; Connor, 1996; Ferris and Tagg, 1996; Hyland, 2004; Hyon 2001; Johns, 1997; Silva and Matsuda, 2001; Spack, 1997; Swales and Feak, 1994; Ventola and Mauranen, 1996), followed by diverse, but general aspects of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), research has moved to highlighting the discipline-specific nature of advancedness (e.g., Belcher and Braine, 1995; Flowerdew, 2002; Hyland, 2006; Hyland and Bondi, 2006; Johns, 1997; Spack, 1997; Swales, 2004; Swales and Feak, 1994; Zamel and Spack, 1998).
In that trajectory, the notion of genre has become central, especially for advanced level writing (e.g., Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 2002; Johns, 2002). In particular, Swales’(1990) analysis of the research article in terms of an Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) structure and his positing of genre-specific textual moves have attained near-canonical status. Other analyses have addressed citation practices, tense and aspect use, ways of posing questions and raising problems, contrasting opinions and drawing logical conclusions; forms of hedging one's claims and evaluating extant findings, as well as writers’ metadiscursive comments as a way of creating an authorial voice (Ädel, 2008; Francis, 2006; Hyland, 2005; Jessner, 2006).
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) contexts, too, rely on genre analysis to capture advanced ability levels, especially for language use in business (e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Bhatia and Gotti, 2006). Importantly, these discussions foreground social relationships, identities, and power structures characteristic in attorney–client or doctor–patient relationships or in the nature of negotiations, sales, or job interviews, over more language-based interpretations of the construct genre.
By contrast, contrastive rhetoric (Connor, 1996), one of the earliest and most prominent research strands addressing issues of advancedness, had focused on different rhetorical traditions and their effect on learners’ ability to acquire the patterns valued in L2 literacy. Because that interest can fall prey to (out)dated notions of texts, of writing, and of learning (Kubota and Lehner, 2004), more recent scholarship highlighting the social situatedness of writing draws on diverse methodologies and data sources (e.g., genre analysis, corpus analysis, qualitative historical and ethnographic approaches) in order to create what is called an intercultural rhetoric (Connor et al., 2008).
Finally, a broadly textual approach to describing advancedness in ESL contexts is that chosen by Biber and researchers inspired by him (Biber, 1992; Biber and Finegan, 1994). Building on his extensive investigations of textual variation through multi-feature/multi-dimensional analyses, Biber (2006) characterized diverse university registers by drawing on computerized corpora and computational analytical tools. Analysis included the description of prevalent vocabulary patterns; the use of lexico-grammatical and syntactic features; the expression of stance; the use of lexical bundles; and a multi-dimensional analysis of the overall patterns of register variation. Applied to ten registers (four written and six spoken) that range from informationally dense prose to interactive and involved spoken registers occurring in university settings, the research provided crucial information for teaching and testing at the advanced level that is explicitly language oriented (Biber et al., 2002).
Advanced proficiency as situated language use toward a multicompetent literacy. Characterizing advanced abilities in terms of situated language use in context (e.g., through register and genre) opened the door to a second prominent research strand, namely that highlighting sociocultural and sociolinguistic considerations of appropriateness. An area directly implicated is pragmatics, which investigates the interaction with/relation between social and linguistic phenomena, most recently expanding from a focus on speech acts to utilizing discourse-analytical approaches. Furthermore, learner discourse is now understood as reflecting the pragmatic conventions neither of the L1 nor of the L2 community (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005) but as creating its own space, particularly through the interaction among advanced communicative participants (e.g., Kinginger and Belz, 2005).
Other central qualities of advanced proficiency are addressed through such related notions as literacy, situated discourse abilities, and, more generally, the dialogical nature of advanced language performance. Thus, Byrnes et al. (2010) propose a multicompetent literacy in order to foreground the humanistically oriented educational concerns and learning goals of collegiate foreign language programs, both of which require advanced L2 abilities. Recognizing that the content foci of public, institutional, and disciplinary language use are realized in certain preferred genres, they envision an evolving genre-based literacy as learners progress toward and also within the considerable expanse of what is called advanced L2 performance (Byrnes et al., 2006; Crane, 2006).
The considerable performance range within advanced proficiency might then be imagined through the following progression: (1) recounting, reporting, and narrative or story genres that focus on the verbal system and express Participants, Processes, and Circumstances in real-life situations, first in simplex, then in complex clauses that move from paratactic to hypotactic and embedded clauses; (2) genres that privilege more metaphorical construals of life, realized through increasing lexical density and greater syntactic complexity, with human participants engaging with public and institutional concerns, values, and beliefs that express comparative, contrastive, and issue-oriented stances in terms of logical relationships; (3) genres that feature both human and abstract actors in created textual spaces by using verbal processes, chunks, collocations, and phrasal stems that can lay out logical arguments in an increasingly greater range of genres and disciplinary and content areas (see Byrnes, 2009a).
Advanced abilities can also be described through two major forms of dialogicality. Oral language use manifests the overt dialogicality of conversations; in addition, advanced abilities comprise the covert dialogicality of intratextual aspects of coherence and cohesion, and of various forms of intertextual reference. In line with Bakhtin's notion of the centrally dialogical nature of language, Wertsch (2006) characterizes advanced forms of language performance by referring to language users’ ability to incorporate the complex intertextualities that make up what is commonly referred to as cultural literacy. Even more, advancedness involves the ability to “reflect the voice of others, including entire groups, who are not present in the immediate speech situation” (p. 61). Advanced forms of language use can therefore also be seen as a multivoiced language performance, a notion that is only heightened in a multilingual and multicultural world.
Both conceptualizations provide a basis for comprehensive curricular trajectories toward advanced ability levels. Their realization in educational settings with their particular educational philosophies and human and material resources, and, most important, their particular learners who themselves can vary greatly, requires informed pedagogical decision-making. But as Byrnes et al. (2010) have shown, the very existence of situated, long-range curricular thinking that is also embedded in a principled pedagogy and carefully conceived assessment practices, can significantly enhance the likelihood that learners in fact develop advanced L2 ability levels. This is true inasmuch as such a conceptual framework is entirely compatible with the kind of dynamic, variable, and non-linear view of language development that recent SLA research has begun to foreground (Norris and Ortega, Chapter 35, this volume); it is also compatible with emergent notions of multicompetent language use—in fact what advanced multicompetent L2 abilities might be depends on just such contexts. In other words, research has yet to obtain trustworthy evidence for the capacity of instructed L2 learners to attain advanced multilingual abilities.
Perhaps the most serious impediment in that regard is that mainstream theorizing, research, and educational practice have not addressed the relationship between contexts of language use and textually oriented formal features of language. While that deficit has no debilitating consequences for teaching and learning at lower ability levels, the social-semiotic and textual quality of language is central to fostering advanced abilities. To date, the only comprehensive account of language as a textually oriented meaning-making resource, one that furthermore espouses educational concerns, comes from systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) as elaborated by M. A. K. Halliday and researchers inspired by him (representative publications are Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Halliday and Webster, 2009; Hasan et al., 2005/2008; Martin and Rose, 2003, 2008). From this extensive literature, I highlight two particularly fecund areas: (1) the semiotic shift central to the language of schooling and, by implication, advanced language abilities; and (2) a set of dimensions that can help conceptualize advanced language proficiency as a long-term process.
A central claim in SFL is that meaning-making through and in and with language takes place from two perspectives. What is called a congruent form of semiosis makes sense of our physical and social environment in the most direct way from experience to language: Participants are expressed mostly with human identifiable actors (My friend), Processes as verbs (visited), and Circumstances through lexical items or prepositional phrases (for the first time). By contrast, in non-congruent/ metaphorical or synoptic semiosis, the same meanings are remapped to a different grammatical category, while yet retaining, in this fused state, some of the process-meaning of the verb: My friend's recent visit to Berlin restructures information through nominalization both from the standpoint of meanings and of syntax. At the same time it adds layers of meaning: the original human actor has now become an abstract actor in conceptual space, visit, and an entire clause has been reduced to a single noun phrase available for new syntactic roles in new clausal structures.
This semiotic shift is one way to describe the difference between what Halliday (2002) terms the “choreographic complexity” of oral language and the “crystalline complexity” of written language (cf., pp. 335–337). Accompanied by greater lexical density (pp. 327–331), the relationship between grammatical and content words, this semiotic shift as lexicogrammatical shift, most especially nominalizations of verbal processes, enables textual meaning-making capacities that are fundamental to the genres of public discourse, institutions, the professions, and disciplinary ways of knowing. This is so because this semiotic shift–SFL aptly refers to as grammatical metaphor (GM)– is fundamental to the creation of new, textual worlds: it helps create coherence and cohesion over longer textual stretches (cf., Byrnes, 2009b; Ryshina-Pankova, 2008), ways of structuring larger meaning chunks, it marks foregrounding and backgrounding of information and theme-rheme progressions, and establishes the kind of cause and effect relationships typical for advanced language use (e.g., Coffin, 2006; Martin and Rose, 2003; Schleppegrell, 2004, 2006; Teruya, 2006).
SFL explicitly links the human meaning-making capacity in texts to a context of situation and, ultimately, a context of culture through a number of conceptual and analytical tools.
(1) The hierarchy of stratification refers to the fact that language is stratified into a system of “meanings,” its semantics, and a system of “wordings,” manifested in the lexicogrammar of a language. The L2 learner's task is therefore to learn to look at the language system trinocularly from all stratal angles: “from below,” in terms of the available L2 resources along the continuum of lexicon and grammar; “from above,” in terms of resources available for signaling meaning in context; and, “from within,” to come to appreciate the internal organization of a given stratum (cf., Matthiessen, 2006, pp. 35–37).
(2) The spectrum of metafunction refers to three central metafunctional modes of meaning in language: the ideational metafunction construes our experience of the world as meaning; through the interpersonal metafunction language enacts social roles and relations; and the textual metafunction organizes the flow of information in language use.
(3) The cline of instantiation recognizes that a given text is but a specific instance of the meaning-making potential available in the entire language system; the goal is to enable learners to become aware of the system's resources so as to be able to make their own situated choices of meaning-making.
Combining the three foundational dimensions of the language system with the semiotic trajectory delineated above, Ortega and Byrnes (2008b, p. 293) describe advanced L2 users as being engaged in “the complex task of instantiating the system in a particular text and, in reverse, coming to understand that each text is but a particular realization of the system that provides certain glimpses into the system's potential ... the cline of instantiation is perhaps the key way in which one might describe how far an advanced learner has advanced or, for that matter, can advance.” Research with an SFL orientation has well substantiated the progression outlined above for charting L1 literacy development (Christie and Derewianka, 2008). It appears that the same semiotic progression, precisely because it is based on evolving lexicogrammatical, that is, meaning-making capacities, applies to adult L2 learners (Byrnes, 2009b). For that reason, it can serve to circumscribe a principled curricular and pedagogical framework toward advanced abilities over long periods of time (cf., Byrnes et al., 2010 for an application to writing).
Knowledge regarding the nature of advanced abilities is seriously constricted by the fact that prevailing research primarily uses cross-sectional methodologies, tends to investigate isolated features without a comprehensive language-based theoretical framework, and essentializes “L2 learning” by not considering how previous instruction might have influenced both its attainment and its particular profile. By implication, research has been unable to consider how an instructional approach that would explicitly target advanced abilities right from the start might change existing assumptions about instructed L2 learning, including the attainment of advanced abilities (Byrnes 2009; Byrnes et al., 2010; Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, 2008; Ortega and Byrnes, 2008b).
The following external and internal factors come into play. For a number of reasons, it is uncommon for programs to develop and follow agreed-upon principled proposals regarding the development of advanced L2 abilities: (1) they do not have the instructional time necessary for advancedness to be realistically attainable; (2) they separate language learning from content learning, thereby creating their own educational dead-ends; (3) they craft course-based instructional proposals rather than articulated, multi-year curricula; (4) their learners often hail from instructional cultures that emphasize formal accuracy, have varied literacy backgrounds, and performance profiles, and enroll for short time periods. All these factors directly and indirectly influence subsequent pedagogies and create a glass ceiling for attaining advancedness.
The first two characteristics predominate with FL programs, one explanation for the scarcity of data for non-English advanced L2 learning. The noteworthy exception is heritage language instruction, in the USA primarily Spanish. The latter two apply to collegiate ESL programs, many of which are driven by test-derived assumptions regarding L2 learning. Finally, in mainstream education, the demand that English language learners perform the same tasks as native learners complicates obtaining differentiated data.
In order to overcome these limitations, several recommendations merit attention:
Fostering advanced L2 abilities requires learners to be highly aware language users, with regard to language as a culturally embedded system for making meanings and with regard to diverse approaches toward language learning. Research increasingly suggests that such meta-awareness will itself need to be created in instruction. Indeed, it is considered to be at the heart of continuing development toward very advanced literacies, often a life-long project. Similarly, it seems that advanced L2 abilities are possible in instructed settings when instruction presents content that is worth learning and, in turn, requires learners to create content worth thinking and communicating about. Not least among the consequences of such a stance is the motivating force for language learning and identity construction when a multicompetent speaker is taken seriously and valued for being able to work with several language systems. In such a hybrid third space learners can find an intellectual and affective environment that is conducive to developing a new authorial voice and, as desired, new situated identities (see Duff, Chapter 25, this volume).
For advanced abilities that third space involves various aspects of literacy, including learning to appropriate several collective dialogs, to use Wertsch's term for learners’ moving comfortably in several language systems as dialogic meaning-making environments. As mentioned, instruction must focus on enabling them to extrapolate from particular textual instances to the system and, in reverse, on deploying the system's resources to create and interpret instances of oral or written texts. Development toward advanced L2 proficiency can then be described as continued expansion of registerial domains that themselves reflect bundles of language features in line with the major functions of language. Less abstractly, it is about learners expanding their generic repertoires, where genres reflect texts as typified social action. Importantly, both registerial and generic expansion will take place at the intersection of highly probable and valued discursive conventions and learners’ desire and ability to expand those conventions creatively in line with their own interests and intentions, including judiciously subverting and playing with them. The capacity toward simultaneously learning language and learning content as new ways of being and knowing is a local phenomenon, with learners engaging with the language in the trinocular dimensions mentioned earlier on. Finally, at the advanced level, learning language “from within” is about developing a sizable repertoire of fixed phrases and chunked language within the central dynamic of that language system, its lexicogrammatical resources (Rinner and Weigert, 2006).
Such learners characteristics and needs, of course, relate directly to desirable features for an instructional program. Worth reiterating is the need for a principled curricular progression that begins by envisioning the very possibility of advanced L2 learning. By embracing an explicitly text-based instructional approach it can model the lexicogrammatical resources of the language in terms of the functional domains of field (the content being construed and conveyed), tenor (the social relations being enacted), and mode (the role played by the textual language itself) (cf., Byrnes et al., 2010; Martin, 2009; Rothery, 1996). Given the intimate and intricate relationship between linguistic resources and their development and use in various texts, instruction toward advancedness must assure textual variety in order to let learners encounter the range of options made available by the language system. Instruction will need to favor a semantically oriented cognitive focus that starts with the intent to mean. In movement that Samuda (2001) describes as meaning–form–meaning in task-based language instruction, learners can first become aware of the intricate interweaving of meaning-form relationships that are available as semiotic choices and then progress to deploying those resources that best convey their own intentions and judgments. Finally, linking curricular, pedagogical, and assessment practices right from the start, and doing so variably with sensitivity toward the local context in a transparent fashion is crucial for conveying an articulated and consistent educational philosophy, itself a basis for facilitating learners’ progress toward attaining advanced L2 proficiency (Byrnes et al., 2010; Norris, 2006; Shohamy, 2006).
I conclude by referring to an area traditionally associated with advanced L2 abilities, indeed deemed indispensable for attaining them,—namely study abroad. While there is little dispute about the overall benefits of a study abroad sojourn, recent research has shown that an in-country stay in and of itself in no way guarantees the development of advanced abilities (Kinginger, 2008). Equally important is learners’ willingness to be “oriented toward this goal in a profound and enduring way” (p. 108), as is their ability to “derive coherence from their study abroad experiences and the interpretive resources they recruit for this purpose” (p. 108). That conclusion is both a healthy antidote to overstated expectations for study abroad and welcome recognition of the substantial contributions of well-conceived instructional programs.
In light of the previous representations the following directions should prove particularly useful for future substantive and substantial engagement with the phenomenon of advanced L2 proficiency:
(1) A push toward theorizing advancedness through functionally and textually oriented approaches to language analysis. Because of the extended developmental nature of advancedness such theorizing would ideally include further specification of diverse developmental dimensions, in terms of performance profile and in terms of processing characteristics;
(2) Explicit linking of advancedness to multilingualism. In line with the bilingual turn in applied linguistics, this research will engage in “non-normative comparisons with multilingual natives and other multiple-language learning profiles” and will analyze L1/L2 users’ multiple repertoires (Ortega, 2010);
(3) Expansion of research contexts into additional domains. This will serve such interrelated purposes as describing and researching advancedness beyond the classroom, most likely in the interplay between naturalistic and instructed learning, and investigating rigorously the nature of teaching and learning toward advancedness. Ultimately, it should facilitate systematizing what we know about the capacity for advanced L2 learning;
(4) Expansion of the domains of inquiry regarding advancedness. Beyond the current heavy emphasis on largely academic and written norms, it will address advanced performance in multimodal contexts (Tardy and Swales, 2008);
(5) Longitudinal studies investigating diverse aspects of instructed language learning, particularly with regard to measurable aspects of efficiency and effectiveness of learning; the development of language in the professions; the determination of thresholds of language ability at the advanced level that would be relatively immune to language loss and, in reverse, enable rapid revitalization of upper level language use after extended periods of non-use (see contributions in Ortega and Byrnes, 2008a);
(6) Research on learning multiple languages to advanced levels. Research findings would benefit such diverse areas as translation and interpretation and the increasingly prominent language needs in government, including the diplomatic service, security, and the military, for example with regard to the possibility of cross-training across typologically related languages;
(7) Development of corpora that use to greatest advantage the capacities of corpus-based analyses. These would serve to research the nature of advanced learner language in different modalities and different domains;
(8) Further specification of research methodologies suited for investigating the development of advanced L2 abilities. This means working through challenges presented not only by longitudinal studies, but by the highly varied and dynamic nature of language learning, the active role of learners, and the textual and meaning-focused quality of advanced L2 performance.
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