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.

Countering traditional monolingual ideologies that associate multilingual development with various deficiencies, more recent research probes into potential advantages of this developmental experience. The discussion about putative multilingual advantages remains highly controversial and also emotional, as it affects far-reaching policy decisions. The chapter attempts to provide an objective state-of-the-art report, discussing research findings on executive function (control), cognitive reserve, cognitive development, educational attainment, and metalinguistic awareness. It furthermore tries to identify the boundary conditions that help to explain why some studies report positive results while others do not. Current research suggests that the characteristics of the speaker groups sampled, especially in terms of their type of bilingualism and multilingualism (balanced, unbalanced, heritage speakers, etc.), offer important clues for a better understanding of this domain. Moreover, the social prestige associated with the languages studied appears to influence the results considerably. Language users are not deterministic machines, but react to social pressure in intelligent ways.

Chapter 13: Becoming a Strategic Reader. This chapter focuses on the development of the strategic reader, rather than strategies themselves. Strategic readers automatically and routinely apply combinations of effective and appropriate strategies, depending on reader goals, reading tasks, texts being read, and strategic processing abilities. Strategic readers are also aware of their comprehension success in relation to reading goals and apply sets of strategies appropriately to enhance comprehension with difficult texts. Becoming a strategic reader is challenging and requires considerable instruction and support. The chapter reviews research involving several instructional approaches to develop strategic processing, including Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), Questioning the Author, Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI), Promoting Adolescent Comprehension of Text (PACT), and Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI). The chapter then links strategic reading to the challenges of advanced “reading to learn” goals, and concludes with implications for instruction.

The relationship between early multilingual learning and metalinguistic awareness is a particularly intriguing one. Not surprisingly, research into the effects of multilingualism on children’s linguistic development and awareness of language has attracted a lot of attention over the past years and decades as studies have found both positive effects of multilingualism on the development of metalinguistic awareness, and also facilitative effects of metalinguistic awareness on language learning. In the recent literature, metalinguistic awareness has been linked to important qualitative changes in the language and learning processes of multilinguals.

The chapter begins with a review of foundational studies on how monolingual children develop emergent literacy, then moves to explore how children develop multiliteracy by learning to interpret symbols and icons in their immediate contexts. The research shows that children find ways to experience and construct meaning from their local scripts in each of their multiple languages. Studies presented in this chapter show that children can interpret symbols in several different scripts, and that they find strategies to navigate multiple languages and become competent speakers in their communities.

Pierre Escudé’s text begins with a reminder of the history of dialects across France, and particularly Occitan. He draws our attention back to the nineteenth century and France’s systemic repression of minority languages. Against this tide, he gradually became the ambassador of these so-called dialect languages and developed the field of intercomprehension, actively challenging the adage: “One country, one language”. On the contrary, he describes how linguistic diversity may reinforce national identity surprisingly, through its most recent immigrants: “If my little one speaks Occitan, he will really be French.”

Drawing from classroom examples of ‘focus on form’, this chapter demonstrates how ‘form’ covers more than just grammar. Referring to second language acquisition research, it explores why a focus on form may be particularly important in the foreign language learning context and why the adolescent learner may be particularly able to benefit from opportunities to focus on features of language. The chapter presents a wide range of options of opportunities to focus on form, including an emphasis on the importance of giving explanations and on the potential for learners to learn from the feedback they get when using the language to communicate. The chapter draws on examples from a range of language classrooms and, also includes examples of the types of planned exercises teachers use to draw learner attention to form.

This chapter deals with the status of meaning-generating processes, taking place in language use, in relation to human cognition. A basic assumption is that reflexive or metalinguistic awareness is one of the original evolutionary prerequisites for the development of human language, and that it plays a central role in all instances of producing and interpreting utterances. The chapter reviews the ways in which metalinguistic activity types and indicators of reflexive awareness have been accounted for in the past. It explores the relevance of the topic for a pragmatic understanding of social interaction, with special attention for cross-linguistic variability (and hence with implications for intercultural communication). Finally, it reflects on methodological problems involved in the study of the phenomena at hand, and perspectives for future research are briefly sketched.

Aptitude and language experience (i.e., multilingualism) are two individual differences that have attracted increasing interest in the field of second language acquisition. This chapter looks at the role that aptitude and multilingualism play on language learning under different pedagogical conditions, and specifically with different forms of feedback. Questions that we try to answer are: Do learners with high cognitive aptitudes and language experience benefit more from corrective feedback than those with low cognitive aptitudes and language experience? What cognitive aptitudes benefit learning when receiving implicit vs. explicit feedback? What type of feedback is effective regardless of learners’ cognitive aptitudes and language experience? Results from laboratory and classroom research with adult learners suggest that the effects of feedback on language development are constrained by a number of cognitive aptitudes such as linguistic analytic ability and rote memory. Multilingualism seems to provide young adults with an advantage under conditions that do not include metalinguistic information during provision of feedback. For learners over 65, however, learning appears to be negatively affected by what they perceive as an excess of information during practice, i.e., when feedback includes information about how the language works, but not when that information is presented prior to practice.

The chapter discusses the notions of norms and standards in conceptualizing the evolutionary status of World Englishes. While “standard language” is the product of its functional and formal development in Haugen’s (1972) model, in Schneider’s (2007) model it is the status attained by a regional variety that has become endonormative. From the sociolinguistic perspective, the standard may be seen by its users either inclusively, as a uniting medium for the speech community, or exclusively, as an elevated reference style of English associated with correctness and an ideology of the standard. The norms of a variety can be induced from corpus data, showing how it has differentiated itself from the source variety. Two case studies illustrate the interplay between standards and norms. In both, there is grammatical evidence of the norms shifting away from their exonormative standards yet discomfort expressed in some quarters about the popular regional forms (Singlish, Taglish). Corpus evidence suggests that metalinguistic awareness of tension between Singlish and “good English” is stronger in Singapore than the equivalents in the Philippines, correlating with their evolutionary status.

The present chapter provides a detailed look at intonation used for the marking of new and given information in Black South African English (BSAfE). Studies show that, when listening to English, speakers of BSAfE perceive differences in prosody and prominence. Prosodic cues in the signal lead to prosodic entrainment which facilitates processing in speakers of BSAfE. However, speakers/listeners do not show metalinguistic awareness of the prosodic cues nor are these actively produced in their own speech. The findings for intonational marking of information structure in BSAfE are framed by related observations for other varieties of English in order to locate the intonational features of BSAfE in the wider context of intonation in New Englishes. The observed changes in the intonation systems of many New Englishes point to a certain instability of focus prosody.