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Children's Unspoken Language
By Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon
An important part of learning to be a competent, social human being is learning how to send nonverbal information. Equally important is learning how to understand it. Children acquire these skills throughout childhood. The aim of this book is to document this important part of child development.
Children express their knowledge and understanding of situations, concepts and people in nonverbal ways before they can articulate the same information in words. So nonverbal communication provides an invaluable window through which to see children's social, emotional and cognitive development. Understanding these important channels of communication can help parents and professionals working with children facilitate children's learning and development.
Because children, particularly the very young, often lack the language skills to express their knowledge and understanding, we often seriously underestimate their abilities. This is a great folly on our part, and I hope the current text goes some way to rectify this. What you will find as you read on is that there is a wealth of information in nonverbal signals. Sometimes we respond to these cues without conscious awareness. Sometimes we remain entirely ignorant of them. Even worse, because of inaccurate "folk psychology" we often misinterpret nonverbal cues and draw the wrong conclusions. This book aims to document some of the ways that children communicate over and above what they say.
Gesture not only reflects children's understanding and knowledge, but it can also influence the way that children learn. Goldin-Meadow (1999) proposes that this occurs via two routes.
The first has already been described. Gesture demonstrates to teachers and parents the level of understanding of the child. This understanding may include their newest and often still implicitly understood thoughts. This can allow the adult to offer instruction or help at the most appropriate level to facilitate learning.
The importance of sensitively structuring learning has been shown in a number of studies (Wood Bruner & Ross 1976), where an adult 
scaffolds the child's learning by timely instructions. The most recent research shows that gesture provides important cues that help in this process (Goldin-Meadow 1999).
So if you're trying to decide what a child understands about a given problem, make sure you look at their gestures as well as listen to what they say as they explain their reasoning to you. The information conveyed in gesture but not in speech is likely to be the information that the child is least sure of and in most need of extra help with. If some part of their reasoning is incomplete and not articulated in either gesture or speech, you may need to take a step back and give additional support to elicit this.
Second, gesture provides a different way for the child to think through problems that may be too difficult to formulate in a verbal manner. For example it may be easier to express the dynamic and spatial relationships between the earth, sun and moon in gesture than articulating all of the information in speech. Furthermore, by using gesture to "think about" some aspects of the information, this "frees up" verbal resources to deal with other points. In other words encouraging children to gesture when they are thinking about and reasoning about complex concepts can help them to spread out the mental load of the task. In the earth, sun and moon example, it might be helpful for the child to gesture the moon orbiting the earth while saying "at the same time the earth orbits the sun." With a little imagination it is possible to think of similar ways to help children express almost anything and in doing so to help them understand