dressing, finding shelter, marring, and dealing with death. The foods that we think are good to eat, the kind of clothes we wear, and how many people we can marry at one time are all parts of our culture.
Our own culture seems very nature to us. We feel in our hearts that the way that we do things is the only right way to do them. Other people’s culture often makes us laugh or feel disgusted or shocked. We may laugh at clothing that seems ridiculous to us. Many people think that eating octopus or a juicy red piece of roast beef is disgusting. The idea that a man can have more than one wife or that brothers and sisters can marry each other shock other cultures.
Ideas of what is beautiful differ from one culture to another. The Flathead Indian of North America used to bind the heads of babies between boards so they would have long sloping foreheads. In the Flathead culture, long sloping foreheads were beautiful. Other cultures might think that they are strange-looking and unattractive. Many people cut scars into their bodies or tattoo themselves so that
others in their culture will think they are beautiful. Objects are inserted in holes in the nose, lips, and ears in a number of different cultures in many twentieth-century
societies, rouge, lipstick, eye shadow, perfume, and hair spray are all used to increase attractiveness.
When people die, different cultures dispose of their bodies in different ways. Sometimes bodies are buried. Sometimes bodies are buried in the ground. In many cultures in the past, people were buried with food, weapons, jewelers, and other things that might be useful in the next life. For example, the ancient Egyptians buried people with little human figures made from clay. This clay figures were supposed to work the death person in the other world. A religious group called the parses exposed their dead on platforms for birds to eat. Some people practice a second burial. After the bodies have been in the earth for several years, the bones are dug up and reburied, sometimes in a small container.
These are just a few of the many different customs that are found in different culture. Most of times, the different ways that are the customs of different cultures are neither right nor wrong. It is simply that different people do the same things in different ways
The scope of culture has been widened. The previous view of culture as “intellectual refinement” and “artistic endeavor” has been extended to encompass “the ways of life of a society”. In other word, notion of the culture in language education has been expanded from “culture with a big C” to “culture with a small c”. “Culture with a big C” focuses on the “sum total of， a people’s achievement and contributions to civilization: art, music, literature, architecture, technology, scientific discoveries and philosophy”. “Culture with a small c” includes “the behavior patterns of the life style of people: when and what they eat, how they make a living, the way they organize their society, the attitudes they express towards friends and members to their families, how they act in different situations, which expressions they use to show approval and disapproval, the traditions they must observe, and so on.” （梁焕强,2003：58）There was a consensus between many language educators that a distinction between “big C” culture and “small c” culture should be made and that the priority should be shifted from the former to the latter in language education.
“Culture” in the contemporary teaching of languages includes these aspects, but much more attention is paid to the everyday life style of ordinary citizens and values, beliefs, and prejudices they share with their fellows within their linguistic and social groups, with due attention to intragroup differences.
By cultural background knowledge, as the term suggests, it is the knowledge about culture in the English-speaking countries’ life background. According to American linguistician Charles Carpenter, cultural background knowledge is the knowledge about culture, which is connected with people’s daily life. It includes the national traditional culture, customs, history, geography, and so on. Each culture has its own cultural background.
In the perennial search to determine what it is that makes discourse in a foreign language to understand, attention has focused during the 1980s on the background of communication: if you do not have that background knowledge and those shared cultural values which enable speakers who are member of the same speech community to communicate easily with each other, then you will find problems in understanding discourse in the foreign language.
What is culture? Hundreds of definitions can be found in the literature on culture. Following the definitions of sociologists and anthropologists, culture refers to the total pattern of beliefs, customs, institutions, objects, and techniques that characterize the life of a human community. “Culture consists of all the shared products of human society” (Robertson, 1981:126). In this sense, it means not only such material things as cities, organizations and schools, but also non-material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns, and languages. Putting it simply, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society, “the ways of a people.” Culture is a national phenomenon. Each nation has been living in its unique geographical and
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