These notes focus on the background information necessary for effective communication in English. This limited educational goal is the one that needs special emphasis today. Our changed time requires that our knowledge of background information should be constantly widening.
All human communities are founded upon specific shared in-formation. Americans are different from Japanese, who in turn are different from Germans, because each group possesses spe-cifically different cultural knowledge. Ultimately, the basic goal of foreign language teaching is acculturation - the transmission to pupils of a foreign language of the specific information shared by the native speakers of the given language.
To reflect certain aspects of British and American reality we have provided a rather full listing of several groups of specific English phrases each of which has one common element - name of colour. We hope that pupils and teachers will find them useful for discussing the linguistic picture of the world and the national culture reflected in the language.
