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In 1997, Bartningcollated a series of papers investigating a little studied type of L2 learners,the apprenants d’un niveau d’instructionélevée. She provided a list of distinctive characteristics of L2 Frenchbased on studies available at the time. However, much work has been devoted toadvanced learners since, not only in French (e.g. for tense and aspectacquisition 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 thanthe descriptive / functionalist approach used in the above studies have alsopaid attention to this type of learner; for example, the Universal Grammarframework has investigated ultimate attainment in the context of the CriticalAge Hypothesis (Birdsong 2005), and sociolinguistic and pragmatic models havelooked at the (non-) acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in advancedlearners (Dewaele, 2004, Regan &#38; Bailey, 2004).Therefore, in the lightof new corpora and findings, it is now time to revisit and refine the conceptof advanced varieties both in instructed and natural settings. 