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English Language Teaching (ELT) has been with us for many years and its significance continues to grow, fuelled, partially at

least, by the Internet. Graddol's study (2000) suggests that there were about a billion English learners in the year 2000 - but a 

decade later, the numbers will have doubled. The forecast points to a surge in English learning, which could peak in 2010. The 

same study indicates that over 80% of information stored on the Internet is in English. For the first time in history there are 

more non-native than native users of the language and diversity of context in terms of learners' age, nationality, learning 

background etcetera has become a defining characteristic of ELT today. What does this imply? Technological innovations have 

gone hand-in-hand with the growth of English and are changing the way in which we communicate, work, trade, entertain and 

learn. And it is non-native users of English, frequently from Asian countries, who are arguably, at the heart of this. It is fair to 

assert that the growth of the Internet has facilitated the growth of the English language and that this has occurred at a time when 

computers are no longer the exclusive domain of the dedicated few, but rather widely available to many. Warchauer (2002) has 

discussed this change in terms of conflicts between local identities and the globalization of the English language; while others 

have suggested that the Internet may be a contributory factor in shifting away from a communicative towards a context-based 

approach to language teaching pedagogy. The notion of widespread availability requires some qualification as there are clearly 

important issues of a 'digital divide' and 'electronic literacy'. This issue is frequently presented as being between nations  and it is 

clearly the case that the most powerful economies dominate Internet activity; but such a perspective explains unequal power 

relations purely from the influence of external factors and the picture is surely more complex than this. The same type of 

economic power relations also exist within nations, and divisions of social classes within are equally important here. In short, it 

is the middle and upper classes in virtually every country who have much greater access to computers, it is the Asian countri es 

which are experiencing massive growth as their economies develop and change. Change of this magnitude clearly raises a 

number of issues for ELT and, it is argued, necessitates a revision of traditional definitions of what constitutes the English 

language as well as a move away from the established EFL/ESL classifications and towards a less culturally loaded view of 

English as a global or international language (EGL/EIL). This in turn has implications for language pedagogy and approaches 

to syllabus design.