Teaching and learning English as the global language in the education systems of the globalized world

The article considers the problems caused by the educational paradigm shift as a result of the English language acquiring the status of the global language in the process of globalization. The authors argue that the transformation of English into the language of worldwide communication calls forth a revision of the traditional approach to teaching foreign languages. English as the global lingua franca could no longer be treated as a foreign language. This demands a reorganization of language education based on a transition to multilingual teaching and learning in which English language teaching is envisioned not as traditional teaching of one of the national variants of English, which leads to acquiring the corresponding dominant cultures, but as teaching English as the language of world communication used for overcoming interlingual and intercultural barriers in the globalizing world