Gestures refer to the communication where visible bodily actions are used to communicate important messages. They include movement of hands, face, or other parts of the body. Gestures benefit our lives a lot. Take language learning.

In some languages, certain syllables (音节) within words are pronounced with markedly more weight than others, called lexical stress. Languages such as English commonly feature lexical stress. For example, the word “accent” involves more emphasis on the first syllable, “ac”, than the second, “cent”. Native speakers of Chinese, however, don’t use lexical stress and therefore find it difficult to learn languages that feature it.

Making any hand gesture could help learners recognize lexical stress, which has been proved by Xing Tian’s team. They selected 124 native Chinese speakers, who watched videos of people performing hand movements that were synced(同步的) to recordings of the same English words. In addition, they also found when more pronounced gestures matched the stressed syllable, the participants were particularly good at identifying it.

The research involved several experiments, which makes it difficult to combine the results. Nevertheless, Tian estimates that the use of gestures helped identify lexical stress between 10 and 15 percent more accurately compared with no gestures at all, and how much help depends on the nature of gestures.

A follow-up study conducted by another team exposed the same Chinese speakers to Russian words and got similar results. “Our findings highlight the functional role of gestures in enhancing speech learning, suggesting practical strategies for language teaching and learning,” the researchers write in their paper.

The benefits of gestures extend far beyond teaching and learning. Since gestures are deeply integrated into our daily lives, they deserve more of our attention.

When I lived in Boston, I taught English as a second language to adult students from around the world. On the last day, they threw a nice party. I was amazed they had learned enough English     1     (organize) such an event altogether. At the end of the party, they proudly handed me a gift box. After the box     2     (open), I gently lifted a beautiful coat from it. “We went shopping for a new coat!” they all shouted     3     wonderfully perfect English.

Being able to understand local jokes is often seen as a great icebreaker for a foreign language learner    1    tries to start friendships with native speakers. However,when     2     (study)a foreign language,a beginner always considers jokes hard to understand.Most of the time,jokes are only funny for people who share acultural background or understand humor in the same way.And there is    3     (much) to understanding a joke in a foreign language than understanding vocabulary and   grammar.

4 . In some ways, it is surprising that languages change. After all, they are passed down through the generations reliably enough for parents and children to communicate with each other.     1     For example, while Japanese has changed relatively little over a thousand years, English evolved rapidly in just a few centuries. Many present day speakers find Shakespear’s sixteenth-century plays difficult and Chaucer’s fourteenth-century The Canterbury Tales nearly impossible to read.

Languages change for a variety of reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic, and political pressures, as there are many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization, and migration.     2     Frequently, the needs of speakers drive language change. New technologies industries, products and experiences simply require new words. By using new and emerging terms, we all drive language change. But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language change because no two individuals use a language in exactly the same way.     3     Through our day-to-day interactions, we pick up words and savings from other people and integrate them into our speech. Teens and young adults, for example, often use different words and phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and slowly change the language.

    4     Vocabulary can change quickly as new words are borrowed from other languages, or as words get coined, combined, or shortened. Some words are even created through misinterpretation of form. As noted in the Linguistic Society of America’s publication Is English Changing?, the word pea is one such example. Up until about four hundred years ago, pease could refer to either a single pea or many peas. At some point, people assumed that pease was the plural form of a new word, pea, based on the way pease sounded. While vocabulary can change quickly, sentence structure — the order of words in a sentence changes more slowly.     5     For example, during the Great Vowel Shift five hundred years ago, the pronunciation of vowels in English changed dramatically. This shift represents the biggest difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and Modern English.

While China celebrates the year of the rabbit, many Vietnamese are buying new cat-themed decorations. How the cat substituted for the rabbit     1     (remain) debatable. Some suppose the custom has to do with language. In old Chinese, the word tied to the rabbit year is pronounced “mao (卯)”    2     pronunciation is similar to mèo, the Vietnamese word for cat. Some think it relates to landscape. Originally the Chinese preferred a lifestyle close to wilderness, choosing rabbit as an animal living in the wild fields. In contrast, the Vietnamese chose the cat because they treated cats     3     friends living in their houses.