Perspectives Toward the Development of Intercultural Communicative Competence: Theoretical and Pedagogical Implications for Japanese English Teachers

Although CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) was introduced into Japa-nese English education in the mid-1980s under the initiative of the Monbuka-gakusho (the National Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture of Japan), the implementation of CLT has been challenging for Japanese English teachers. This article explores possible sources for the difficulties that CLT has caused in Japan. It examines factors such as Japanese sociocultural, political, and edu-cational contexts that have significant influence on curricular innovation. This article further argues that the underlying assumptions of CLT that are based on the native-speaker competence model are not compatible with the contexts of Japanese English education because these assumptions include native-speaker competence as a primary goal of second language acquisition. Recognizing the current status of English as an international language, the authors propose an alternative model based on the notion of intercultural communicative compe-tence (Alptekin, 2002) and discuss how the model of intercultural communica-tive competence can be applied to Japanese English education