Intercultural Competence in Japanese Language Teaching

The paper sheds light on some contemporary methodologies of teaching Japanese as a second language at Japanese universities from the point of view of intercultural competence. In linguistics the terms intercultural and cross-cultural are often used synonymously, but we make a certain distinction between them. While crosscultural supposes a kind of meeting between different cultures without any special interferences, intercultural evokes an association of a ？crash“ between different systems of values while trying to accept the ？otherness“ and it also implies a process of retrospection of one’s own system of values. On the other hand, the development and cultivation of intercultural competence is a long and many sided process concerned both: 1) with the foreign language and culture, that are to be mastered and 2) with one’s own language and culture, too. Many of the practices described in the paper stress on two points that are important for the development of intercultural competence: 1) teaching language and culture as a whole and inseparable unit and 2) providing the proper medium for a communication at an individual level