Look around. If you can see someone talking, the chances are, they will be moving their arms as they speak. Perhaps it is small, subtle hand movements or maybe it is gestures so large that they’re almost comical. Why are they doing it? Is speech alone not enough? The short answer is: no.

Teachers spend much of their day standing in front of an audience - a critical one at that - and how ideas are presented is crucial. Students understanding a concept or remembering a single key fact could alter their grades or the average score of the class.

Most teachers think they rely on their voice and the content of what they are saying to help children learn. But what everyone is doing with their arms and hands is actually very important indeed.

A growing body of evidence suggests that, contrary to prior psychological belief, the arm, hand and finger movements that occur when we talk are not simply a hangover from before we evolved speech and therefore communicated primarily through gestures. Instead, they are actually a crucial component of how we impart information and how people remember it.

Geoff Beattie, professor of psychology at Edge Hill University, is something of a leading light in this field. He has published numerous papers and books on the topic, and regularly appears on TV and radio programmes to discuss what body language reveals about our thoughts and feelings. Beattie explains that body language is largely not something that we do consciously. “When we talk, we cannot inhibit our gestural movements,” he says.

What role do these gestures have? Sometimes, they can be physical manifestations of our mental searching. “When we talk, we need to find the right words to explain what we mean and gesturing helps us ‘find’ the right words from our mental lexicon,” Beattie explains.

More than a token gesture

What’s intriguing, though, and what research is demonstrating, is that these gestures also help us to impart more information to the listener in an unconscious manner, leading to a better understanding and recall of the topics being discussed.

“They [speech and gestures] have always been integrated but, for thousands of years, we have misunderstood this and thought it was all about speech and the rest was just weird hand movements. But, actually, gestures are core to the message and convey crucial information,” Beattie argues.

He cites a renowned experiment conducted at Columbia University in the US as an example of this. Two sets of participants were asked to watch a cartoon. They were then filmed describing what they had seen in the cartoon. One group could do this however they wished, gesturing in the way that came naturally to them. The others had their arms strapped to a “special” chair that they were told would take various body measurements as they spoke. In reality, the straps were there simply to stop them moving their arms.

These recordings were then shown to two more groups - one group saw the first, unencumbered speakers while the other saw those strapped to a chair. Both were then asked to explain the plot of the cartoon. The participants who received information from those able to gesture had a far greater understanding of the cartoon and its plot than those who had heard the story from the participants unable to move their arms. This was powerful stuff as it underlined just how much additional information can be passed on in gestures when they are aligned with speech.

The impact of this was taken further in research conducted by Beattie and his colleague, Heather Shovelton, which was published in the British Journal of Psychology. They found that gestures could be more powerful than imagery in helping to pass on key information - and they used an experiment about an advert to prove it.

As part of the experiment, an advertising company produced two versions of the same advert to see which would lead to better understanding and detail-recall of the product being marketed. The product was a fruit smoothie and the three key points to be passed on were: that it used fresh ingredients; that it was “for everyone” ; and information about the bottle’s size.

The traditional version used actors and interspersed images, such as one showing fresh fruit when the word “fresh” was mentioned, a mock-up of a newspaper headline saying “everyone” was drinking the new product when this was discussed, and the actual bottle to represent its size.

The second version, however, used gestures for this information. The word “fresh” was matched with a movement, where hands were placed as if around an imaginary ball and then moved apart, while the words “for everyone” were matched with a large sweeping gesture. The size of the bottle was represented by one of the actors holding their hands apart at roughly the same size as the bottle.

Two groups of 50 people were then played the different adverts. The research showed a notably higher ability to remember the key details about the advert among those who saw the gesture-based version compared with the image-heavy one.

A helping hand

Given the millions spent on advertising campaigns, this was a fascinating outcome, as the paper’s conclusion outlined: “The results …have potentially significant implications for how we might think about the design of effective communication … They suggest that speech and gesture together are better at semantic communication than speech alone.”

Furthermore, the results remained the same when the groups were tested again three months later, with the gesture group demonstrating a better recall of the key points of the advert than the image-only group.

For teachers, then, this suggests that they should not try to inhabit their natural body movements when talking but instead embrace this aspect of communication and use it to their advantage.

“Teachers should always express themselves,” says Beattie. “People have been told for years not to wave their arms around when talking, that it’s distracting - certainly when I started doing TV appearances this was the rule - but, over time, people have realised it’s far better for passing on information.”

The same goes for pupils: “When they are talking, you shouldn’t tell them to stop waving arms around; in fact, you should encourage them to gesture as it means they are communicating more.”

But what if you’re not a “performer” ? Are you missing out on conveying all this extra information because you’re not waving your arms around or contorting your hands into all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes?

Beattie says you’re not: “These movements don’t have to be massive theatrical gestures. Some movements may look insignificant but, sometimes, something small that captures the eye - that helps explain a concept - can have really powerful effects.”

What you can’t do, he adds, is try to manufacture these movements: “When [the gestures] are natural, they precede the speech, termed the ‘preparation phase’, and so they arrive just before the meaningful element [of the speech] that we want to emphasise. But when people try to deliberately do this [gesturing], the preparation phase is not quite right and we can sense something is off.”

Beattie cites US president Donald Trump as an example of this. “He is really odd. He’ll often wave his arms around when talking about something confusing and then make a precision gesture when saying how he can fix it. However, what he is doing is not quite as it should be because you can tell he’s not doing it naturally but has probably been told by someone that gestures like this make people understand what he’s talking about.

“It’s really hard to do it right and we can tell when it’s unnatural and it distracts us.”

In fact, it is so difficult to get conscious gestures right that their presence (or absence) can be a giveaway if someone is telling a lie, says Beattie. “One of the most interesting indicators of deception is that people inhibit their hand movements and this suppression suggests we are trying to dampen behaviours we instinctively know others pick up on.”

For this reason, the actors appearing in the fruit smoothie advert for Beattie’s research had to spend a long time practising the delivery of the gestures with the speech to ensure they appeared as natural as possible.

The gestures used were chosen after a large group of people were asked to talk about the key points and gesture spontaneously. The researchers then identified commonalities. The level of work required to come up with movements for three fairly generic concepts, and the work that trained actors had to put in to make their use seem natural, underlines just how innate this naturalness of gesture is and why mimicking it is not easy.

“It’s harder than you might think to develop a lexicon of gestures because their form changes depending on context,” adds Beattie.

Given all this, teachers should probably not overthink their “performance” style in the classroom or start practising elaborate movements. Instead, they should trust that their natural gestures are an ally in helping to pass on crucial knowledge and aiding recall. It turns out all that arm waving is not so strange after all.

Dan Watson is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and business

This article originally appeared in the 14 June 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Body language”