In this longitudinal study, we examined the effects of the use of English as the language of instruction in the first 4 years of secondary education in The Netherlands on the students' language proficiency in English and Dutch, and achievement in subject matters taught through English. Compared to a control group in regular secondary education, students attending this form of bilingual education showed higher scores for their English language proficiency in terms of oral proficiency and reading comprehension. No effects have been found for receptive word knowledge and no negative effects have been found with respect to the results of their school leaving exams at the end of secondary education for Dutch and subject matters taught through English.

Theory building is a dynamic process. Theories develop and grow, they are dependent on initial conditions, social interactions, variation, and they are stable for some time only to move on to the next phase. They can develop gradually, but a non-linear pattern is more common. Most importantly, theories develop over time. Theories are typically based on shared cognitions and they are situated. Written descriptions by definition reflect versions of the theory that are outdated the moment they are in print, though some of the core assumptions may be more stable than other, more peripheral ones. All of this very much applies to the present discussion of our paper on a DST approach to SLA. Inevitably, we, and probably most of the commentators, will already have moved on in our thinking about DST and SLA by the time this comes into print. In particular with new approaches, we will see a great deal of variability: wild ideas flourish and the links between grand theoretical notions and empirical database to support them tend to be out of balance. That may be seen as a weakness, but it probably is an inevitable developmental stage in building a new theory, or, as in this case, the application from a theory developed in other fields to SLA.

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If language processing and development is viewed as a dynamic process in which all subsystems interact over time, then some basic assumptions behind more traditional approaches to language analysis are problematic: new methods of analysis and modeling are needed to supplement and partly replace existing paradigms. This argument is illustrated with two examples from recent studies.After a brief history of the reasons for a paradigm shift and an explanation of the role of variability in development, the first example study presents a variability-based approach to reaction time measurements in which spectral analyses of variability found during repeated measures of the same experiment may indicate moments of behavioral change. Then the principles of dynamic modeling are explained, illustrated with vocabulary developmental data. The second recent study shows how the vocabulary development of three learners is may be dynamically modeled using a logistic model.

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