The English language curriculum prepared by the Ministry of National Education for high schools in Turkey seems to be satisfactory in theory, but the related studies about the attitudes of actual practitioners towards English classes in high schools are not detailed and comprehensive enough. This study aims to fill this gap. To do so, qualitative research was conducted with 13 English language teachers and 55 high school students from different parts of Turkey. They were asked for their opinions, applications, observations, and challenges of the English language teaching system in their high schools and some suggestions for the problematic issues were requested from them via open-ended questions. The data were analyzed descriptively; the results showed that most teachers are not satisfied with the coursebooks, crowded classes, quite limited class hours, and unmotivated students. Their main suggestions cover the privatization of education, having language libraries, labs, speaking clubs, and more lesson hours for English and decreasing the number of students in each classroom. Additionally, teachers want to attend international seminars to become aware of the latest methods/sources. Students have some valuable suggestions for the improvements as well. Nearly all of the students are unhappy about the coursebooks; thus, they suggest them to be revised. They also want to join international projects and improve their language skills. As a result of the study, suggestions covering many issues like coursebooks, assessment, teacher training, and European projects were proposed with an aim to diminish the gap between theories and applications in real classes.

This chapter presents the theoretical background of dynamic assessment (DA) and its praxis with pedagogical suggestions for foreign language writing instructional settings. Resting on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (1978), DA asserts that there is a need for blending instruction with assessment because of the social interaction's salience on cognition modification. Thus, DA adopts learning-and-learner-based feedback approaches and a present-to-future model of assessment, which rests on reciprocal teacher-learner interaction. Grounding in the need for enlightening DA in an EFL setting, this chapter presents reciprocal interactions between a teacher and four students. The interaction analyses unveil that the teacher has adopted a variety of mediational moves to finely instruct the students and diagnose their microgenesis, and students have displayed various reciprocity acts towards the mediational moves provided to them, which unpacks each student's zone of proximal development. Based on these findings, the chapter ends with suggestions for EFL writing teachers.

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Dynamic Assessment (DA) has lately taken the floor as an alternative by embedding instruction into assessment. Grounded in the dialogic teacher-learner interaction during an in tandem work, DA asserts that diagnosing the learners' matured abilities and needs, mediating them accordingly, and then observing their maturing abilities and microgenesis are crucial. This assertion paves the way to reveal each learner's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Despite some influential studies on the use of DA in language education, more studies are warranted to explore the use of DA in different contexts and with different participants. Therefore, this case study recruited two multilingual immigrants/refugees who were underachievers in L2 writing classes. They were provided individual interactive DA for ten weeks, and the dialogic interactions between the teacher and the students were analyzed. Initial results revealed that the mediational moves mainly rested on teacher-agency, but over time more learner-agency-oriented mediational moves were also adopted. Furthermore, these students started to narrow the gap between themselves and their classmates. Lastly, a semi-structured interview was conducted to illustrate the participants' perspectives towards DA in the L2 writing context, and the related data revealed recurrent themes that had bidirectional relation with DA's theoretical premises.