With its focus on the advanced learner variety, this ambitious volume aims to provide an overview of what has been learned on the topic in the past 10 years. Labeau and Myles present a collection of contributions that stem from a workshop held at Aston University in June 2006. The index is useful in identifying key concepts; however, it has to be noted that some chapters (e.g., Leclercq) assume knowledge of French. The format of this book enables the inclusion of a wide range of methods adopted by the contributing researchers to investigate various acquisition issues in French as a target language, including innovative experimental designs. This volume presents evidence from new (naturalistic and experimentally elicited) data gathered from English second-language contexts as well as from non-English second-language contexts (e.g., French, Dutch, German, and Greek).

Despite the common focus, the variety of approaches results in a lack of coherence and in chapters that are of unequal strength. Some chapters are a bit descriptive and rather speculative (Bartning), and others present studies that appear to suffer from some methodological shortcomings. For example, although the data presented in the Howard chapter on study-abroad participants are quite interesting, some researchers may point out that data from a control group (i.e., a group of classroom learners), which are not included, would have strengthened the results presented. It may also be pointed out that Klingler’s design did not include samples of French native speakers’ narratives, which could have served as a point of comparison with the narratives produced by the three Japanese participants and analyzed qualitatively to measure syntactic and discourse complexity.

Readers may also expect more depth in some studies. Some researchers may regret the lack of individual analysis in the chapter on French relative clauses (Monville-Burtson and Kakoyanni-Doa), which could have potentially added to the discussion of the data. Additionally, although Labeau and Myles justify its inclusion as a “control group” (p. 10), the final chapter (Leclercq), which is the only chapter that focuses on English as a second language (with French native speakers), seems a bit out of place, especially given the subtitle of the volume.

More detailed presentations of study designs would have been useful to satisfy more advanced researchers. For instance, it is unclear why Forsberg limited her study to interactions between native and nonnative speakers. Furthermore, no explanation other than “this order has been chosen by the informants themselves” (p. 227) is provided by Klingler for systematically collecting narratives in the first language before those in the second language. Some researchers may wonder why a counterbalanced design was not used; others may even suggest that a task effect may be possible—the narrative in the first language having served as a practice for the one in the second language. Moreover, given the range of methodologies used and of topics investigated, a conclusion or a discussion by the editors, in which the results presented in the different chapters are considered, would have been welcome to summarize the advances on what the position is on the advanced learner variety today, compared to 10 years ago.

All in all, this rather nontechnical volume would be accessible to beginning graduate students interested in the field as well as to researchers who would like to gain knowledge of perspectives on the advanced learner variety. Despite the limitations noted for several studies, the topic will certainly interest many researchers in the field and will undoubtedly result in additional research on the advanced learner variety.