Our spontaneous gestures greatly enrich our speech. A burgeoning new field of research investigating communicative gestures has begun to uncover the ways we use our hands to communicate. Recently, this field has broadened its focus to include cross-cultural analyses of gesture use. In this review, I summarise recent findings stemming from this body of literature. I then discuss the role of gesture in second language instruction and acquisition, arguing that a focus on gesture can augment non.native language pedagogy. Lastly, I present neuroscientific findings providing evidence that gesture does indeed facilitate the process of communicating in a second language. I hope to convince the reader that gesture has already taught us abundance about how people around the world communicate and, in turn, students will communicate more effectively with people around the world if we teach the importance of integrating gestures in their speech.