ECNS – Gu Liping 
Students’ comprehension of words in a foreign language improves if teachers pair each word with a gesture, even if the gesture is arbitrary and does not represent a word’s actual meaning, showed research released by the University of Illinois (UI) on Tuesday. The 30 participants in the study were all native speakers of American English or considered it to be their first language. While about one-third of the participants considered themselves bilingual, none had any experience with Mandarin or any other Chinese language. (more)