Previous chapters showed that learners are ready to engage in instruction that addresses sophistication. It therefore behooves the field to examine what the construct of “pronunciation” means to both learners and practitioners.

The present chapter explores the need for new assessment criteria; it makes a call for research incorporating variables that would examine, for example, L2 learners’ awareness of what we call “sophisticated-language use” so as to match their manifested beliefs with how they are able to describe what advancedness should look like.

Are we, as scholars, helping to perpetuate elite-bilingualism and nativespeakerism? And how do we affect identity construction among L2 learners and heritage speakers? We assert that the communicative approach in teaching and assessment needs to shift to a more holistic and sociocognitive approach. This also extends to the need to reconceptualize our focus of assessment so that all skills, as well as other forms of literacy and cultural awareness are included.

What remains to be examined in the next chapters is learners’ self-perception, identity construction and awareness of their own social agency as L2 speakers

The present chapter uses a mixed-methods analysis to examine if L2 learners associate their learning with developing intercultural competence, and if these associations vary according to individual differences. It compares how L2 learners view language proficiency and sophisticated language use, and explores how they associate global citizenship with multilingualism. Responses to a survey were collected from N=67 L2 learners enrolled in either Tier I (basic language) or II (linguistics or culture) courses. Quantitative analyses revealed that age and instructional tier had a main effect on their level of intercultural awareness. Qualitative data showed that learners do not conceptualize language proficiency differently than sophisticated language use. Their definitions of global citizenship showed that they see multilingualism as the gateway to being a global citizen and language learning as the means to network with and learn from a global community. Agency and their roles as global citizens were only minimally mentioned; they self-identified primarily as L2 learners, not as L2 users with the ability to be agents of change on a global stage.

The issue of cultural relativism has been a major one for theorists of human rights. Arguments about cultural difference represent perhaps the strongest criticisms of the idea of human rights, and for many they are the most difficult to deal with (Brown 1999, 2020). This is especially true for social workers from Western traditions, who are generally aware of the role of the West in colonising other world-views and who wish to value cultural diversity. This results in Western social workers (among many others) feeling somewhat guilty about supporting something called ‘human rights’ and being particularly susceptible to the criticisms of human rights as a Western concept and therefore somehow not to be trusted. The aim of this chapter is to explore this difficult area, with a view to developing an approach to human rights that overcomes these dilemmas. Herein lies the key to dealing with cultural difference: the capacity to look critically at all cultural traditions is contextualised differently in different cultures, and to see that human rights violations and the struggle for human rights occur in all cultural contexts.

outlines the history of citizenship as a political concept, showing that the dominant view of citizenship today is still primarily seen as nationally provided and tied inextricably to legal status, despite global and urban scholars challenging its claims of exclusivity and immigration scholars challenging its singular focus on legal status. The limited power of these critiques is due, in part, to the fuzziness of claims regarding rights and identities. The authors make a fresh start in the systematic conceptualization of citizenship, showing that legal status is not the gateway to rights as is often assumed. In its place, they develop a concept of federated citizenship as a parallel set of rights along five key dimensions, with the provision of those rights varying by jurisdiction – federal, state, and local. They also lay out important differences between progressive citizenship, regressive citizenship, and reinforcing citizenship. Finally, they move from concept formation to the development of indicators for state citizenship regimes, which sets the stage for the empirical analysis is subsequent chapters on Black citizenship rights and immigrant citizenship rights.