ABSTRACT
The inclusion of “advanced language proficiency” in this Handbook is a first even as a concern for “advancedness” is hardly new. Two views of language have influenced existing research, particularly in the USA: an earlier cognitive, psycholinguistic “acquisition” orientation and a more recent social, “use” orientation. Concurrently, European scholarship pursued a blended, semantically, and textually oriented approach that focused on linguistic phenomena in inter-ethnic discourse and used a longitudinal methodology (e.g., Perdue, 1993). The two orientations have thus far not been linked. As a consequence, the field does not yet have a sufficiently comprehensive theoretical basis for understanding advanced language, much less advanced language use.
