In 1997, Bartning collated a series of papers investigating a little studied type of L2 learners, the apprenants d’un niveau d’instruction élevée. She provided a list of distinctive characteristics of L2 French based on studies available at the time. However, much work has been devoted to advanced learners since, not only in French (e.g. for tense and aspect acquisition of L2 French: Kihlstedt, 1998; Howard, 2002 and Labeau, 2002, 2005) but also in other languages: Spanish (Salaberry, 2000), Italian (Giacolome-Ramat, 2002) etc… Many different theoretical frameworks other than the descriptive / functionalist approach used in the above studies have also paid attention to this type of learner; for example, the Universal Grammar framework has investigated ultimate attainment in the context of the Critical Age Hypothesis (Birdsong 2005), and sociolinguistic and pragmatic models have looked at the (non-) acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in advanced learners (Dewaele, 2004, Regan & Bailey, 2004).

Therefore, in the light of new corpora and findings, it is now time to revisit and refine the concept of advanced varieties both in instructed and natural settings.