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The Education Teaching Performance Assessment (edTPA) is a performance assessment of teacher effectiveness that is increasingly used to make decisions about licensure for teacher candidates, including candidates seeking certification in world languages. Because of the high-stakes nature of this assessment, it is important to isolate and better understand the factors that may have an effect on teacher candidates' scores. This mixed-methods study examined the results of a survey of 22 recent teacher candidates who completed the edTPA and of participant interviews with 13 of those candidates. Candidates' interview data were triangulated with data obtained from interviews with six cooperating teachers (CTs), survey data from seven CTs, and teacher candidates' scores on the edTPA. Teacher candidates perceived that aspects of their placement, including the amount of guidance provided by their CT, had an impact on their edTPA performance, particularly in the areas of target language use and communicative vs. grammar-based approaches.

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This article aims to discus what we know about the impact of gestures on memorisation of items. There have been few studies on that subject so far. I am specifically working on the impact of teaching gestures (very iconic movements used by teachers in classroom, especially in second language teaching) on young children (aged 5 years old). This article describes an experiment in which young subjects had to memorise words in L1. Theses words were heard on a video and were illustrated by gestures. Some of the children just had to look at the gestures and repeat the words heard, others had also to reproduce the gestures they saw. Results show that in a free recall task, children who have reproduced the gestures memorise better than those who only looked at them and than those of the control group. These results concern short term memorisation of L1 words but will help us to conduct further experiments on long term memorisation of L2 lexical items.

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Eye-trackers are becoming increasingly widespread as a tool to investigate second language (L2) acquisition. Unfortunately, clear standards for methodology—including font size, font type, and placement of interest areas—are not yet available. Although many researchers stress the need for ecological validity—that is, the simulation of natural reading conditions—it may not be prudent to use such a design to investigate new directions in eye-tracking research, and particularly in research involving small lexical items such as articles. In this study, we examine whether two different screen layouts can lead to different results in an eye-tracking study on the L2 acquisition of Italian gender. The results of an experiment with an ecologically valid design are strikingly different than the results of an experiment with a design tailored to track eye movements to articles. We conclude that differences in screen layout can have significant effects on results and that it is crucial that researchers report screen layout information.

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