The contents of this volume are drawn from papers presented at the 2005 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT), the theme of which was educating for advanced language proficiency. In her introduction, Byrnes notes that despite the obvious need for advanced foreign language capacities and the clear limitations of current instructional practices, the advanced learner is often overlooked in SLA theory and research and continues to receive inadequate pedagogical attention. To help rectify this situation, the conference conveners brought together leading cognitive linguistic, systemic-functional, and sociocultural researchers in order to “specify the construct of advancedness in theory and research and for laying out broad parameters for curriculum, instruction, and assessment in support of the acquisition of advanced levels of L2 ability” (p. 3). Each of the 12 chapters is provocative, and the volume, overall, is of excellent quality. Researchers and educators alike will find this work profoundly useful.

Section 1, “Cognitive Approaches to Advanced Language Learning,” includes five chapters that variably draw upon aspects of cognitive-functional linguistics. Langacker's opening contribution provides a highly useful overview of construal, metonymy, conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending, and fictive motion that, united, form a view of grammar as “assemblies of symbolic structures” (p. 17). To closely paraphrase Langacker's perspective, language is about meaning, and meaning resides in conceptualization. The next three chapters, which report on aspects of an integrated project that combines Levelt's (1989) model of language production with language-specific patterns of grammaticization, examine the question of why grammatically and lexically accurate advanced second language (L2) users nevertheless produce overall text structures that are marked. Von Stutterheim and Carroll propose that the primary cause is that patterns of linguistically mediated information organization correlate to underlying crosslinguistic differences in perspective-driven patterns of grammaticization. Carroll and Lambert's related study suggests that advanced L2 users rely upon the basic information patterns of their first languages (L1s) but in ways that also illustrate a blending of L1 and L2 choices and logics. Behrens presents evidence that contradicts Levelt's claim that the conceptualizer is language independent, with the implication that for translation tasks, and for L2 learning more generally, the conceptualizer module is deeply affected by grammaticized meanings associated with an individual's source language. Together, these three chapters propose that advanced L2 learners would benefit from greater awareness of the close relationship between the conceptual content of grammaticized forms and the ways these units combine to instantiate larger scale patterns of information flow. In the final chapter of this section, Strauss employs conceptual grammar to disambiguate Korean completive auxiliary constructions that, in other pedagogical texts, have been incorrectly treated as broadly synonymous. The implication for L2 pedagogy is that explicit instruction to describe the conceptual functions of linguistic structures should be presented from early stages of adult L2 learning.

Part 2 of the volume, “Descriptive and Instructional Considerations in Advanced Learning,” includes four chapters that address narrative, lexical inferencing, genre-based content courses, and hedging and boosting in advanced L2 legal writing. In her contribution, Pavlenko provides a review of L1 and L2 narrative research and offers activities designed to move learners from intermediate to more advanced levels of narrative proficiency. Paribakht and Wesche address the problem of inferencing unknown word meanings and suggest explicit training in strategies, such as attention to morphology, word class, collocational patterns, and external verification. Using systemic-functional and genre-based pedagogy as their orienting framework, Rinner and Weigert describe a curricular innovation that traces a single genre across diverse German content courses, such as business and cultural studies, an additional benefit of which is the integration of foreign language course work within the broader intellectual milieu of the academy.

In the final section, Norris builds a strong case for tightly integrating assessment with curriculum and instruction and for viewing assessment as a tool for diagnosing, and then responding dynamically to, instructional problems and successes. Shohamy similarly calls for connecting teaching, research, and assessment within a framework that expands beyond hierarchical and single-solution measures to encompass a plurality of instruments and a consideration of the consequences of assessment practices used.

Throughout this outstanding volume, a core message is that explicit instruction rooted in genre awareness and conceptual and cognitive approaches to grammar could, and should, play a stronger role in L2 education. Interested readers will also note that two additional texts were inspired by the 2005 GURT conference: one focusing on advanced L2 learning within the Hallidayan and Vygotskian traditions (Byrnes, 2006) and the other describing longitudinal research on the development of advanced L2 capacities (Ortega & Byrnes, 2008).