There are two common misconceptions about the meaning of ‘advanced’, which have to be clared up right away. The first is that students encounter ever more difficult structures which they have never met before, and the second is that there is a lot of ‘difficult vocabulary’. The first assumption is simply not true. Structure do not exist in an ever-mounting spiral of inscreasing difficulty: the old, by now familiar, structures continue to be present at advanced levels. And while it is true that there is or may be a lot of ‘difficult vocabulary’ at advaanced levels, that in itself does not constitute a difficulty which a competent dictionary cannot resolve. It is true that the way words are drawn to each other (collocation) is generally recongnized to be a major feature of language acquisition and therefore a source of difficulty. Students may not always be able to produce correct and sometimes idiomatic collocations, but they have less difficulty understanding them. The capacity for reception always exceeds the capacity for production.
There are four principal factors (other than mere lexis) which account for ‘difficulty at the advanced level: content, allusion syntax, grammar points..
Advanced texts assume an extensive ‘knowledge of the world’: the kind of knowledge individuals need to bring with them before they can decode the information in a piece of writing. For the purposes of this book, we have to assume reasonable ‘knowledge of the world’, otherwise learners would not be aspiring advanced students. The more specialized a text, the more difficult it is, and this applies to native speakers as much as it does to language students. It follows that highly specialized texts must be excluded from a book of this kind. Texts drawn from a broad range of fields must be excluded from a book of this kind. Textx drawn from a broad range of fields must reflect the same assumptions that are made by the editors of quality newspapers: namely, that their readers, regardless of their, age, are adult. Texts must present the kind of English, both jounalistic and general, which educated people, with a lively and intelligent awareness of the world around them, encounter on a more-or-less daily basis.
What writers allude to is connected with the assumptions they make about their readers. So, for example, if a writer alludes to ‘the double helix’, he or she is assuming that the reader has encountered this concept before and therefore doesn’t need to have it explained. Allusions may also be culture-bound, referring to aspects of life in the English-speaking world which might be obscure to the learner. A reference to, say, ‘the old-boy network’ has implications for a native speaker which may not be available to a learner.
What makes language difficult is not just words, but the way words are combined to make sentences: i.e. syntax. A sentence is a sum-total of words and this sum-total is greater that its parts. Among the features of syntax that cause difficulty are: participle constructions, relative clauses, apposition, adverbial clauses, complementation after verbs, adjectives and nouns. It is common knowledge that after years of study, non-native learners may still have difficulty in coping with publications like Time Magazine, The Times and The Economist and the ‘quality’ press, because they have never been trained to decode the (often relatively simple) structures that are combined syntactically into complex sentences. The key to comprehension at the advanced level is therefore the competent analysis of syntax. Analyzing and synthesizing train students to understand what difficult language is all about.
Familiar grammar points pose unusual problems because, all their learning lives, students have been given an over-simplified view of them. Common rules, such as the use of the present progressive to describe action and events in progress at the moment of speaking, must be extended to account for sentences like People are becoming less tolerant of smoking these days. Advanced level material therefor requires a deeper understanding of grammatical structures and what they convey, as well as the elimination of persistent errors.