I. IntroductionWith the booming global economy, English plays a more and more important role in international trade. The number of students and social groups that are interested in learning English has sharply increased in recent years. Hao (2007) stated that with the increase of cross-cultural communication and to go with the present society, the final purpose of English teaching should be defined as developing the students cross-cultural communicative ability. This is the capability of perpetrating communication with people from different places with different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, English teaching also is a type of activity of cross-cultural communication teaching. In the English teaching system of middle schools, reading teaching plays a significant role. Furthermore, English reading input also is the major source for a Chinese ESL student. As Nuttall (2002) contends, language improvement is a natural by-product of reading (P.30). The role of reading, therefore, exerts great influence on the English reading teaching. However, for a long time, when teaching English reading in middle schools, teachers always emphasize the language teaching and overlook its cultural background knowledge. As a result, English reading teaching can not meet the requirements of the present cross-cultural communication for cultural knowledge is an important element of cross-cultural communication. Han (2007) stated in many situations, it is often found that although the students have mastered certain English vocabulary and grammar, they still can not comprehend the authentic meaning of text or encounter reading obstacles. The reason for this case is the absence of cultural knowledge. Hence, teaching language is to teach culture (Kramsch, 1993:177). According to Wu (2003), English reading ability can be called a kind of comprehensive communication ability. If people want to understand a text, grasp the main idea of text, and use the information from text to predict, judge and reason, cultural knowledge must be possessed apart from certain English language knowledge. Widdowson (cited in Cheng, 2007) stated that reading also is a kind of interaction between the writers and readers. To some extent, if there is not an understanding of the target language culture, people may find it difficult to get effective comprehension. Hence, the teachers should try their best to impart social cultural background information to students in the process of English reading teaching. The study of leading cultural background knowledge into English reading can effectively improve the students reading ability and reading level; it also plays an important role in improving the ability of cross-cultural communication. Beyond that, under the implications of cross-cultural communication and the cognition of English as an international language, many educators gradually recognize that language learning is not only to learn the language knowledge and skills, but also to acquire the relative cultural knowledge.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current situation of English reading teaching of middle schools in China, and point out the reasons for the limitation of current situation and then explain the relationship between cross-communication and English reading teaching. Next, the author analyzes the importance of leading cultural background knowledge in English reading teaching through a specific case. Also, the study may attract educational scholars to consider the present situation and to put forward some guiding suggestions so as to help those teachers, who only focus on language knowledge and skills, realize that knowledge and cultural knowledge are equally important. In the end, to a great extent, these implications for teachers and students can exert great influence on the educational revolution in our country.II.Literature ReviewAs a quite important part of the English teaching system of middle schools, English reading teaching has attracted many scholars attention. Especially, in recent years, scholars have done a lot of researches from different perspectives according to the current situation of English reading teaching in China. With the study of cross-cultural communication, many scholars extend cross-cultural communication to the foreign language teaching, such as, Hu Wenzhong, Zhang Hongling, etc. Other scholars integrate cultural background knowledge with English reading teaching of middle schools. Although many scholars in China pay more attention to English reading teaching in the middle school, there are still some scholars in China who have studied and analyzed cross-cultural communication and English teaching from various angles. According to some related studies, it is not difficult to find that some of them introduce the relationship between cross-cultural communication and English teaching in middle schools generally, and some of them analyze English reading teaching from the perspective of t