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2.1 Researches on Body Language

     Sine Aristotle, the famous philosopher, first made an analysis on expressions and actions of human beings; body language has developed into an independent subject concerning several fields, such as biology, sociology, communicative science and so on.

  From the 1950’s, many works on body language came out. In 1959, in the United States, Edward T. Hall’s book The Silent Language came off the press, which explored the importance of cultural factors and is regarded as the milestone in the decade (Hall, 1959). And in 1973, Julius Fast explained the meaning of some nonverbal behaviors in his book Body Language( Fast, 1973). Scholars of China have also made a great contribution to the study on body language and they can be roughly pided into three categories, namely, the theoretical study of body language, the analysis of body language in terms of cross-cultural angle as well as the application of body language to practical use such as classroom teaching and public speech. The two outstanding books are Introduction to Body language in 1988 by Geng Erling and Intercultural Communication by Jia Yuxin in 1997. Bi Jiwan published his Intercultural Nonverbal communication in 1999, and Hu Wenzhong edited and translated a series of books on intercultural communication, such as Introduction to Intercultural Communication and so on（Hu Wenzhong 1999）. Some recent study on body language includes A Brief Study of Language in Effective Communication by Hu Mengrong(2008) and An Analysis of Body Language by Li Qidong（2002）.

     All the studies above prove that study on body language has been very comprehensive and propounding. There is still, however, areas slipping the attention of researchers attention, like the proper use of body language in cross-culture communication. 

2.2 Researches on Culture

     It is difficult to find even a single definition of culture on which scholars may have agreements since culture is in fact a rather huge and evasive notion which is rather hard to define. The anthropologists define it as: common knowledge, perceptions and values that constitute the foundation of social, economical and religious institutions in a society. It is reported that there have already been more than one hundred and fifty definitions of culture, but none of them is likely to be capable to reveal us all on culture.

     But, to put it in a simple way, “culture” indicates a team or a community with which we have similar experiences that produce the methods we perceive the world. Most professionals view culture as being the sum total of beliefs, rules, techniques, institutions, and artefacts that characterize human beings.  In other words, culture consists of socially created and learned patterns of behaviour shared by members of a given society—a unique lifestyle of a particular group of people.