Acknowledgements

We are indebted to a number of people who helped us realize this project. Above all, we thank the individual authors who contributed their research, time, and professionalism to the present volume, and in doing so, allowed us to fulfill its central goal, which was to further our understanding of advancedness in L2 Spanish from multiple perspectives.

In addition to the aforementioned authors, various individuals were instrumental in our collaboration. After independently thinking and talking about the notion of advancedness and having informal conversations with colleagues, Kimberly Geeslin and Tim Face suggested that we speak to each other about this shared interest and our work in 2017. Our initial conversations led to the organization of a symposium, held at the University of Minnesota in February 2018, which is where our collaboration with the volume’s contributors began. The symposium brought together a wealth of topics, ideas, data, and research designs aimed at studying advanced proficiency specifically in L2 Spanish. The concluding panel discussion between James Lee, Michael Long, and Kimberly Geeslin helped us to synthesize what we believe are some of the main challenges to investigating advanced proficiency and informed the organization and structure of this volume. In addition to thanking all of the symposium participants, we also owe thanks to the various sponsors from the University of Minnesota: Imagine Fund, Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, College of Liberal Arts Language Center, Center for Advanced Research in Language Acquisition, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, and Institute of Linguistics.

The high quality of the finished product presented in the research of the following chapters was made possible by a vigorous peer review process, and we thank our reviewers from the fields of SLA and linguistics for their professional dedication and their expertise in providing feedback to our authors. They include:

We wish to thank the team at John Benjamins for their assistance throughout the development and production of the present volume. Specifically, we thank the series editors, Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro and Kimberly Geeslin, for their support throughout the development phase, and we thank Kees Vaes and Patricia Leplae for their assistance throughout its production.

Finally, we acknowledge our colleagues and graduate students, whose insights and thoughtful questions regarding second language acquisition inspire projects such as this one, and whose daily interaction with us makes our work in the field so rewarding.