【正文】 ns of body language and a parative study of body language in order to lessen conflicts in crossculture business munication and make it much better and easier.Chapter I． A brief introduction of body language and its function The concept of body languageBody language reflects a certain cultural background and in a certain tradition, body language is determined by its customs and traditions. Psychologist David Abercrombie also pointed out: we speak with verbal organs but we talk with our body [1].The study of body language has a long tradition.More than 2,000 years ago, the ancient Roman politicians Cicero had pointed out that all psychological activities were associated with movements. Gesture was just a kind of human language which everybody, even barbarians, could understand. As we know, body language as a nonverbal language also had been recognized early by people of western countries. In 1872, published the article of Modal Expression of Human and Animal. He had firstly created a research method of linking the nonverbal language of human to the expression of animals that still was widely used in the field of human academic, social language academic, social psychology profession and so on.In the early 1950s, westerners have been studying body language prehensively and systematically. However there were three most influential works about body language, including Kretschmer’s Physique and Character and The Variation of Human Physique and Efron’s Gesture and Environment.In 1952, Birdwhistell’s book of Introduction to Kinestics had conducted a systematic research on body language and created the word of Kinesics. He thought that we should study body language by the way of researching language. And he firstly created the word of Kineme as the minimum body language on researching body language. Through this way, he could pare the structure of behavior with the structure of language so that the research of body language was to be Code Research System. Albacon, an American psychologist, provided more precise figures that the information of someone was posed of three aspects: 55% of body language, 38% of the tone and 7% of the words(畢繼萬(wàn),1999). however, it does not mean that language is the only tool. It also depends on many other nonverbal behaviors. Actually, social munication usually mixed two kinds of toolsverbal and nonverbal. When one is speaking, gesture, eyes movement, posture and facial expression are always acpanying voiced language. Repeating is the fuction of body language. All the movements including all the nonverbal behaviors are behaved as one aimdeepen the impression of meaning [15]. SubstitutingBefore languages were produced, people had to use a variety of gestures to explain what they want to say in order to municate better or live better. Obviously it became the main tool of munication, and now we see that some individuals use relative body language when they cannot or it is inconvenient to express their feeling to achieve the same results instead of oral language and written language. That is what we said of municative function. Sign languages that are used by the deaf and dumb, judging gesture that were used in sports petitions by the judges, gestures that were used by policemen who direct the cars and people on streets all belong to substitutable body language. What’s more, in daily life people shake hands to send their respect to others, waving hands to say goodbye, clapping hands to wele others. Communicative functions of body language are mainly used in the following situations: First, more simple and concise body languages are used to stress the main information. For example, in a petition, people around are very noisy, it39。s fullscaled qualities by distinguish different nonverbal language behaviors. What’s more, at the same time when a teacher praised someone, he would pat the student on the shoulder with a smiling face. All the behaviors are a plement to the oral words. Many examples exist in our daily lives. Suppose you are on a phone call, a friend es to visit you. You will nod your head or give a gesture or give him a glance to ask him to sit down and wait for you. We see sometimes information conveyed by nonverbal acts has no relation with oral words. That is to say, what we have said and what we have done are two different things. Thanks to these nonverbal behaviors especially the eye contact, facial expression, gesture, posture, etc. Language bees more symbolic, emotional and lively. ContradictingCompared with language municative functions, nonverbal behaviors are more reliable and accurate to convey information and record the decisive meaning in language environment. Because languages sometimes are insincere in one39。 eyes to ask them to pay more attention to class. When an English or American speaker is giving a lecture, his eye light will rove the hall to check whether the listeners are listening attentively. At the same time the listeners will greet him with their eyes to show they are listening to him with eager attention, however, when the Chinese are listening to a lecture, they will usually avoid such kind of munication as eye contact. So the foreigner will misunderstand that the listener are ignoring him and think that it is a kind of disrespect.Chapter II A Contrastive study of body language between Chinese and western countryBody language is a kind of symbol and is also a solid expression of one’s culture. China and Western countries have their own different social soil and cultural atmosphere. They have their own long history of independent development and special space, and each of them has its own distinct ethnic characteristics. Body language reflects the characteristics of a nation, it not only includes the nation’s historical and cultural background, it also contains the attitude for life of the na