ACTFL’s World Readiness Standards advocate the importance of enhancing intercultural competence among learners of foreign languages, including heritage speakers. Folktales provide a rich valuable material to entertain and educate; they help not only present the values of a given culture, but also, and most importantly, show why and how these values are held in high esteem. This paper proposes that adopting a proficiency-based curriculum based on folktales would foster intercultural competence. It will show that an interactive-communicative learning strategy informed by a pedagogical framework based on the three modes of communication (interpretive, interpersonal and presentational) would develop students’ critical skills such as logical reasoning, critical views, inferencing, forming persuasive arguments and debating. This, in turn, would foster a deep understanding of the relationship among practices, products, and perspectives of cultures.