The present chapter set out to complement the quantitative analyses in Chapter 3 with more qualitative analyses of L2 learners’ beliefs and assessment of advancedness. We analyzed the different metalinguistic descriptors they produced to describe their beliefs and other speakers’ actual use of language, its content, manner, and the L2 speaker’s identity. We found that our L2 learners were only partially explicitly aware of the language, the content, and the manner exhibited by our L2 speakers, but that they were implicitly sensitive to categorically different levels of intercultural competence among different L2 speakers. We concluded that our L2 listeners could only partially imagine L2 advancedness, and we hypothesized that the lack of a full understanding of advancedness, operationalized as a lack of language awareness, could inhibit their ability to develop an L2 identity. Consequently, we call for future research to examine how institutional intervention, through curricular design or student advising, may help to make students more explicitly aware of the multifaceted nature of advancedness, as well its empowering effect on their identity and agency as an L2 speaker.

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.