Designing an Intercultural Syllabus

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This research presents and expounds a theoretical framework for designing a syllabus for teaching intercultural communicative competence which comprises, in addition to Canale's (1983) for components of communicative competence, cross-cultural competence for shifts of value systems from L1 to L2, and which is required for non-native speakers' communication with native speakers of English. In the syllabus inventories are provided in accordance with its intrinsic psycholinguistic value system, the Intercultural Communication Model, which takes a hierarchical structure of, from core to surface, values, beliefs an affective/modal filter, and finally language functions.Values are subcategorized into three components such as logical, ethical, and aesthetical according to axiology. Beliefs are inclinations in thoughts and feelings owned and shared by individuals of a community. Norms are rules, which affect linguistic and non-linguistic behavior of community members. Language functions are social purposes of self-realization, which determine non-/linguistic forms the speaker adopts. Take as an example the inventory "express oneself directly." This language behavior is traced back to the deep structure of ethical value, then going up to a more surface layer, the belief of individualism, then to the norm of public-self or frankness-oriented, and finally may be realized as an utterance of the function "insisting"/"dis-/approving something."This framework is conceived as a theoretical basis for designing an intercultural syllabus in which inventories are given in correspondence to those of language functions. For the sake of pedagogic application to Japan's TEFL context, the US culture is selected as a foil to Japan's culture.