Analysis of conversations between international university students in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca Interaction (CELFI, McDonough & Trofimovich, 2019) has demonstrated that holds, which are temporary cessations of dynamic movement, are a robust visual cue of nonunderstanding that can be reliably interpreted by external observers as signals of listener comprehension difficulties (e.g. McDonough et al., 2019, 2022, 2023). Using CELFI materials, this study used an experimental design to explore whether business communication students (N = 64) benefit from instructional activities designed to raise their awareness of holds as a signal of nonunderstanding. The students carried out perception tests in Week 1 and Week 5 that presented video excerpts from CELFI showing the depicted listeners' hold onsets and releases, and the students rated those listeners' comprehension. In the interim, 31 students completed weekly awareness-raising activities via Moodle (2 hours per week) for four weeks. A mixed ANOVA showed that students who participated in the awareness-raising activities showed significant improvement in their ability to discriminate between hold onsets and releases. Implications for the use of awareness-raising activities to promote recognition of nonverbal behavior are discussed.