Language teachers are working in a world which has changed in the past decades in fundamentally disruptive ways, through profound changes in the role that networked computers play in everyday life and through the social and demographic shifts brought on by an increasingly globalized society, bringing together more than ever before people from different cultures and languages in real and virtual environments. One of the byproducts of this new environment is the growth in opportunity for language learning, in particular through informal environments such as social networks and networked gaming. The challenges for training language teachers to deal with this dynamic are considerable. They will need to be able to follow new developments in technology and be able to understand their potential use in second language instruction. In this column, Robert Godwin-Jones, examines the interconnected roles that L2 (second language) teachers may need to play in order to be effective in a changing social, educational, and technological environment.