The paper considers consequences of the unprecedented phenomenon in the world's system of languages, i.e. the transformation of the English language into the language of global communication as the result of information revolution and globalization of all aspects of human activities, which have changed generally accepted ideas about foreign languages and the notion of literacy. The emergence of a new educational paradigm according to which the English language is no longer considered as ''foreign'', but as a sine qua non of ensuring the participation of all Europeans in the new knowledge society has been recognized by the European Commission in its document issued in 2005, ''A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism''. The paper presents an analysis of reasons which have brought about the acquiring by the English language of the status of the language of world communication, and takes on the question of what the language of world communication is and in which way it differs from the national variants of the English language. One of the characteristic features of the English language as a lingua franca is its high variability, which is not confined to differences in grammatical and lexical structures of the two major variants of the English language that have developed historically in the course of the emergence of the North American standard of the English language. The paper next considers the problem of the world standard of English as the global language and argues the unfoundedness of the thesis about the need of recognizing the right of developing language norms by the users of English as the second language, even though their number at present significantly exceeds the number of native speakers. Summing up, a conclusion can be made that the transformation of English into the language of global communication calls forth a revision of the traditional approach to teaching foreign languages. English as the global lingua franca has lost its status 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. The transition to multilingual teaching is based on regarding English as a necessary condition for entry into the world economic, political and cultural areas and includes, alongside with the native (or state) language and English as a language of global communication, teaching at least one of the foreign languages offered by the educational system.