Importance of Hand Gestures When it Comes to Learning

    Non verbal communication is a big part of how we communicate with each other and Dr Sarah Delmar researched the importance of it. In her study “How our hands help us learn” she specifically stated “Nonverbal communication encompasses a wide-ranging array of behaviors – the environments we create, the distance we establish between ourselves and our listeners, whether we move our bodies, make eye contact, or raise our voices, all collaborate to send messages” This highlights how many different ways that people can nonverbally communicate and although many don’t realize they do most of these movements, it is crucial to getting a point across and having a conversation. Dr Delmar continued explaining how many people could get confused if non verbal communication wasn’t implemented into a conversation. She gave an example of how there could be two glasses of water, one in a tall thin glass and one in a short wide glass. There are two children who are brought in to describe these glasses. The first child could be explaining the height of the glass and then gesturing the height. But the second child could be explaining the height of the glass and then gesturing the width. Dr Delmar explains how this displays a mismatch of gesture and speech which is proven that children that show this type of behavior, can benefit from instruction in conversation and this would only be seen through non verbal communication.

In the article “Hand Gestures and How they Help Children Learn” both researchers Sharice Clough and Caitlin Hilverman have researched the same topic as Dr Delmar. They both make it clear how hand movements convey messages that verbal communication sometimes cannot. They gave an example of“if I said, ‘I caught a fish last weekend,’ you would not know how big it was. What if, while telling you I caught a fish, I put my hands out 18 inches apart? You would know I caught a big fish, even though I did not say anything about its size!” They go on to explain how gestures in speech can help both the listener viewing the gestures and the speaker producing them.

In conclusion, Dr Sarah Delmar and scientists Sharice Clough and Caitlin Hilverman all showed the importance of hand gestures and non verbal communication. Most of the time it goes unnoticed with how common it is in conversation, therefore the importance of it is normally overlooked. But both research papers show that a lot of conversation isn’t spoken out loud but interpreted with movement.

References

Clough, Sharice, and Caitlin Hilverman. “Hand Gestures and How They Help Children Learn.” Frontiers for Young Minds, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2018, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7523848/.  

Goldin-Meadow, Susan, and Susan M. Wagner. How Hands Help Us Learn, 5 May 2005, cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/c/1286/files/2018/09/How-our-hands-help-us-learn-1fy142h.pdf.