In the face of a vast array of non-English culture and language media, increases in diaspora populations in the United States and elsewhere, the importance of global circuits of capital (and hence global communicative practices), and the increasing penetration of world events into the lives of Americans (with its implications for national security), one would surmise that developing professional-level additional language expertise would not be the exception that it is in the United States. Lambert (2001) described the low percentage of American students who study a foreign language at the advanced level and estimated that only 3% of those studying commonly taught languages such as Spanish or French enroll in advanced-level courses. Although support for less commonly taught languages (LCTL) such as Arabic have recently increased, students enrolled in LCTL programs are presumably even fewer in number. It is also clear that advanced-level coursework occupies only a fraction of most language programs' overall investment of resources. In a fiscal climate that makes the academy increasingly accountable to private sector logic, few interested students make developing advanced language programs a nonutilitarian choice.

In spite of—and perhaps also due to—these ironies, there now exists a renaissance of interest in advanced second language (which, following Byrnes's chapter in this volume, I refer to as AL2) development, as illustrated by this volume, which addresses an assortment of AL2 contexts and languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish). In the first section, “Principles, Practices, and Theory,” the editors in one chapter and Byrnes in a second espouse usefully antithetical views on issues from definitions of advanced proficiency to ontological constructions of the nature of grammar. The bulk of this volume comprises reports on AL2 programs. Among these is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of an 8-day immersion institute for graduate student instructors of German (by Byrnes), a useful overview of Chinese in-country programs that includes a comprehensive list of curricular features (see table on p. 110) available at 12 universities and institutes (by Kubler), and an informative description of a well-conceived process approach for teaching high-level writing in English at a Danish university (by Caudery). Angelelli and Degueldre report on a 180-hour program for French and Spanish designed to catalyze the transition between high-level general proficiency and professional competence necessary for translation and interpreting, whereas Badawi reviews an advanced Arabic reading program that, through exposure to diverse genres of writing, attempts to raise participants' necessarily polyglossic command of Arabic. AL2 technology issues are the subject of Ingold's account of the LangNet Initiative (a set of online materials in a large number of languages that are oriented to serve AL2 students). Ingold describes the LangNet resources designed to bring reading ability up to superior-distinguished (SD) levels. The problem of variability in teacher's communicative competence is the focus of Dabars and Kagan's chapter, and they describe summer institutes designed to enhance teachers' Russian language and culture knowledge. The final portion of the volume comprises two studies concentrating on descriptions of SD learners (by Ehrman & Leaver and Atwell, respectively). Ehrman provides commentary in the areas of fossilization, strategic competence, affective factors, and learner autonomy (among others), whereas Leaver and Atwell report the in-progress results of interviews with SD proficient speakers describing factors contributing to the success of their developmental trajectories. Notable among attributes shared by SD-level interviewees is that all had studied more than one foreign language, nearly all occupy professional positions that require regular use of their additional language, and more than two-thirds were raised in bi- or multilingual families or communities.

As is the case with some edited volumes, the quality of chapters is uneven, with a few bearing a closer resemblance to report writing than critical scholarship. In particular, the Shekhtman, Leaver, Lord, Kuznetsova, and Ovtcharenko chapter, describing the Shekhtman Method of Communicative Teaching, borders on advertising text and promotes somewhat bizarre suggestions. To take but one example, “answer expansion” suggests that in response to a native speaker question, “the student gives the most verbose answer possible” as “[s]hort, simple answers hinder conversation” (p. 120). This bald directive contradicts—debatable as they are—Gricean principles and in many communicative settings would seem to promote interactional incompetence (or worse).

Another problem, especially evident in the introduction by Leaver and Shekhtman, is that ACTFL/ILR guidelines and diagnostics are unproblematically treated as coequivalent with advanced communicative abilities. This forms a reductive metonymy whereby the superior and distinguished rubrics become, de facto, AL2 proficiency itself. By contrast, in her more sophisticated and critically framed overview article, Byrnes asks: What are the entailments, implicit and explicit, of language and the L2 learner within the ACTFL/ILR framework? She responds by noting that formal accuracy and compensatory strategies are privileged at the expense of discourse and sociolinguistic dimensions. Byrnes also notes that the guidelines' emphasis on accuracy implicitly affirms an idealized native speaker that produces a norm- and system-referenced teleology “that bespeaks certain interests” (p. 41), one of which is that an L2 learner would ideally be indistinguishable from an NS, a process that may require a “virtual effacement of the learner's L1 abilities and predispositions” (p. 42). Although Byrnes's critical and well-theoretized chapter is the clear minority in this volume, she is not alone. Badawi notes that the ACTFL superior level posits “features that are not possessed even by native Arabs” (p. 159), whereas Angelelli and Kagan, drawing on the work of Valdéz (1989), acknowledge that ACTFL/ILR scales can be “meaningless … when assessing the abilities of native [and heritage] speakers” as they reflect only the “norma culta” and not the “norma popular” or “norma rural” (pp. 212–213). These exceptions aside, the ACTFL/ILR guidelines are uncritically presented throughout the book. Academic inquiry is premised on denaturalizing habituated perception; I expected more from this volume in this regard.

A last substantial difficulty that permeates the volume is the flat and unsophisticated treatment of grammar. Byrnes's discussion of cognitive grammar (i.e., Langacker) and online processing (i.e., Slobin) is again the exception. Leaver and Shekhtman state that “grammatical accuracy, without any doubt, is the most important element of high communicative focus” (p. 24). What is unspecified is the type and conception of grammar that would form the basis of materials development and instructional interventions. The authors state that “unfortunately, many teachers of lower-level students argue over whether they should teach grammar when they should be asking how and when to teach it” (p. 28). I agree but would add that the “how” and “when” of grammar teaching ought to be fundamentally informed by the question of “which” grammar to teach and for what purposes. Especially at AL2 levels, we should be more attentive to the divergent grammars of written and spoken language (e.g., Carter & McCarthy, 1995). It is surprising that attention to this issue, and correspondingly, the potential of corpus analysis for materials development and learner-directed inquiry into actual language use, is nowhere addressed.

One area of need the authors seem to agree on is that professional-level language proficiency would benefit from an increase in pedagogical materials and approaches specific to field or discipline, genre, and the development of particular communicative abilities (such as those required for translation and interpretation, high-level argumentation, persuasion, and negotiation). Many also proclaim—and I join them—the need for direct and explicit interventions in AL2 instructional settings. This is rarely the case in AL2 curricula, which may focus on literary and “authentic” texts rather than on the mechanisms underlying their structure. These mechanisms—at the level of discourse grammar, genre, and including interactional and cultural resources—are what AL2 users will need to develop sophisticated and specialized communicative texts and contexts.

This volume has both shortcomings and virtues, each of which ought to provoke continued efforts in the area of AL2 research and pedagogy.