Acknowledgments
We are indebted to those who helped us complete the present work by volunteering to complete surveys, to be interviewed, and to help coordinate large data collections in various remote locations throughout the United States. In addition, we are indebted to those who invited us to speak about the work at other institutions, and who thus engaged in a discourse about L2 advancedness, which helped us to better understand our own work and its direction. They include our colleagues, our associates throughout the profession around the world, and most of all, our undergraduate and graduate students, who have shared their experiences as language learners with us during special-topics courses and seminars.
Among all of these people, several stand out as being instrumental in the completion of this work. They include Dr. Kimberly Geeslin and Dr. W. Keith Corbitt, who helped organize data collections; our graduate research assistants, Samuel Hackworth, who helped design our online surveys, Shana Scucchi, who helped format and edit the book, and Meagan Cobb, Carter Vaughn and Samantha Martin, who assisted in coding data; in the United Kingdom, Dr. Alessandro Benati, who organized a symposium in 2018 at the University of Portsmouth where we were able to share our work, and David Ellis and Cecile Porta, who offered perspectives from the francophone world, provided accommodations while conducting research, and more importantly, continue to provide their friendship; in Australia, Dr. James Lee, who, while at the University of New South Wales, provided a venue for this work to be presented, discussed, and shared, so that other perspectives throughout the anglophone world regarding L2 advancedness and higher education could be considered. Most importantly, we are indebted to all of the anonymous participants in the United States and around the world who graciously offered their time, who indulged us by speaking Spanish while being audio recorded, who completed online surveys, and who shared their L2 learning experience.
Finally, we thank Helen Barton, our acquisitions editor at Cambridge University Press, and Izzie Collins, for their support and advice throughout this project.
