11 - Sociocognitive Awareness of L2 Advancedness in Higher Education

Summary

This concluding chapter summarizes the motivation of the book and the various findings revealed throughout. Since the MLA’s (2007) call for restructuring in higher education, it has been clear that a new paradigm is needed. In response, the present volume chose a sociocognitive approach to examine advancedness. Under this framework and using mixed-methods analyses, the object of study extended from solely the learners’ and foreign-language professionals’ linguistic and communicative competencies to examining learners’ identities, perceptions, and expectations of what advancedness is. We interpreted our results such that both learners and other stakeholders are implicitly aware of sophistication in advanced use of L2 Spanish but were only able to explicitly express the definitions that are popular institutionally. Learners appear to ignore the agency they could exert as global citizens. Among practitioners in the field, we found that there was no consensus about what advancedness means and that they expected L2 learners to exercise agency in the L2. The chapter ends with a summary of working hypotheses generated in previous chapters and suggestions for future lines of inquiry.