Advancedness--high-level language use sophisticated enough to adapt to a variety of sociocultural contexts--encapsulates essential elements of L2 learners’ identity. Advanced proficiency, on the other hand, refers to learners’ communicative ability as determined by formal assessments via pre-established criteria (Brown, Thompson, & Cox, 2021). In addition, the term ‘advanced’ has been erroneously defined by non-experts as being ‘fluent’ or ‘bilingual.’ Conflicting definitions reflect varying perspectives among professionals involved in language programs, which could hinder the establishment of curricula and appropriate assessment metrics. After reviewing the most commonly-used assessment scales (ACTFL, CEFR, and ILR), the chapter focuses on what research has found regarding sociocultural and psycholinguistic individual differences, such as study abroad as well as extracurricular habits and behaviors, pre-tertiary education, age of onset, aptitude, motivation, perseverance, and L2 grit. Other facilitating factors are also mentioned, such as equity in accessing extracurricular opportunities; better academic advising, and acknowledgment of the learners’ construction of an L2 identity.

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.