Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities: Constructs, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics)

✍ Scribed by Heather D. Weger (editor), Katherine A. Sprang (editor)

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 217
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Advanced language learning has only recently begun to capture the interest and attention of applied linguists and professionals in language education in the United States. In this breakthrough volume, experts in the field lay the groundwork for approaching the increasingly important role of advanced language learning in the larger context of multilingual societies, globalization, and security.

This volume presents both general and theoretical insights and language-specific considerations in college classrooms spanning a range of languages, from the commonly taught languages of English, French, and German to the less commonly taught Farsi, Korean, Norwegian, and Russian.

Among theoretical frameworks likely to be conducive to imagining and fostering instructed "advancedness" in a second language, this volume highlights a cognitive-semantic approach. The theoretical and data-based findings make clear that advanced learners in particular are characterized by the capacity to make situated choices from across the entire language system, from vocabulary and grammar to discourse features, which suggests the need for a text-oriented, meaning-driven approach to language teaching, learning, and research.

This volume also considers whether and how information structuring in second-language composition reveals first-language preferences of grammaticized concepts. Other topics include curricular and instructional approaches to narrativity, vocabulary expansion, the demands on instructed programs for efficiency and effectiveness in order to assure advanced levels, and learners' ability to function in professional contexts with their diverse oral and written genre requirements. Finally, the volume probes the role and nature of assessment as a measurement tool for both researching and assessing advanced language learning and as an essential component of improving programs.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Figures and Tables
Preface
1. Locating the Advanced Learner in Theory, Research, and Educational Practice: An Introduction
PART I: COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO ADVANCED LANGUAGE LEARNING
2. The Conceptual Basis of Grammatical Structure
3. The Impact of Grammatical Temporal Categories on Ultimate Attainment in L2 Learning
4. Reorganizing Principles of Information Structure in Advanced L2s: French and German Learners of English
5. Language-Based Processing in Advanced L2 Production and Translation: An Exploratory Study
6. Learning and Teaching Grammar through Patterns of Conceptualization: The Case of (Advanced) Korean
PART II: DESCRIPTIVE AND INSTRUCTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS IN ADVANCED LEARNING
7. Narrative Competence in a Second Language
8. Lexical Inferencing in L1 and L2: Implications for Vocabulary Instruction and Learning at Advanced Levels
9. From Sports to the EU Economy: Integrating Curricula through Genre-Based Content Courses
10. Hedging and Boosting in Advanced-Level L2 Legal Writing: The Effect of Instruction and Feedback
PART III: THE ROLE OF ASSESSMENT IN ADVANCED LEARNING
11. Assessing Advanced Foreign Language Learning and Learners: From Measurement Constructs to Educational Uses
12. Rethinking Assessment for Advanced Language Proficiency