Teaching English in the Digital Era
Teaching English in the Digital Era

Summary/Abstract: Living in the world of computers and information technology has brought many changes to the process of learning and teaching English language today. The whole teaching experience should be reorganized in order to find the coherent structure that corresponds to the challenges of the new world. On the one hand, EFL teachers have to keep pace with the development of technology. Today students are active Internet users, therefore they are very comfortable with technology and, consequently, very familiar with what we may call today as “Digital English”. The online medium has enabled them to develop skills in an English language that has become the lingua franca of all Internet users. On the other hand, EFL teachers should also be aware of the fact that, as a consequence of the above-mentioned phenomenon, English has brought people closer to each other, though they may live in very distinct geographical areas. Thus the English language has become international, being used especially by non-native speakers who have started to use a language that responded to their needs to exchange information. We can easily notice nowadays that the English language used in the online medium is somehow different from general or standard English. The question that comes along is whether we still need to teach Standard English today as we used to teach it 20 years ago, or we have to adapt ourselves to the changes of the technological world in which we live. The paper will try to respond to this question by focusing on the analysis of the context in which EFL is being taught today at the academic level.

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