Advanced language learning has only recently begun to capture the interest and attention of applied linguists and professionals in language education in the United States. In this breakthrough volume, experts in the field lay the groundwork for approaching the increasingly important role of advanced language learning in the larger context of multilingual societies, globalization, and security. This volume presents both general and theoretical insights and language-specific considerations in college classrooms spanning a range of languages, from the commonly taught languages of English, French, and German to the less commonly taught Farsi, Korean, Norwegian, and Russian. Among theoretical frameworks likely to be conducive to imagining and fostering instructed "advancedness" in a second language, this volume highlights a cognitive-semantic approach. The theoretical and data-based findings make clear that advanced learners in particular are characterized by the capacity to make situated choices from across the entire language system, from vocabulary and grammar to discourse features, which suggests the need for a text-oriented, meaning-driven approach to language teaching, learning, and research. This volume also considers whether and how information structuring in second-language composition reveals first-language preferences of grammaticized concepts. Other topics include curricular and instructional approaches to narrativity, vocabulary expansion, the demands on instructed programs for efficiency and effectiveness in order to assure advanced levels, and learners' ability to function in professional contexts with their diverse oral and written genre requirements. Finally, the volume probes the role and nature of assessment as a measurement tool for both researching and assessing advanced language learning and as an essential component of improving programs.

The form and structuring of an ordinary-language text (say the description of an instruction or a story) are largely pre-determined by the quaestio, the explicit or implicit question that the text as a whole is seeking to answer. This is the pilot concept that the presents study sets out to examine and substantiate with reference to an extensive fund of material collected under controlled conditions. A further concern is to clarify what role is to be attributed to cognitive functions in text production and how the various conditioning factors interact in this process. The results of the empirical study demonstrate that strictly modular or sequential models of speech production are not adequate to the task of mapping the interplay of speech planning processes.

For an interdisciplinary approach to linguistics spatial concepts are of especial significance in that they represent a link between linguistic and extra-linguistic cognition. In language production spatial representations form the starting-point for a class of linearization processes; vice versa, in language reception we have delinearization processes building up mental spatial representations from linguistic structures. Such processes are subject to restrictions specific to individual languages and resting on the respective relations between the language system and the conceptual system of spatial categories and relations.