Language centres: are we holding the future in our hands?

With the advent of web 2.0 and the ease of use of many hand-held devices the access to the internet has never been easier. This has been accompanied by a growing range of sites available for learning an L2. These sites offer lessons, explanations, exercises, corrections and feedback. It now becomes time once again to question whether physical bricks and mortar language centres are necessary any longer, or whether the language centre can now be held in the palm of our hands. With special regard to English, this paper reports on a survey carried out at a university language centre in the south of Italy where students are regularly involved in face-to-face lessons but whose courses also involve guided use of websites and independent use of websites outside of the confines of the language centre. The survey is designed to investigate how students react to these different EFL learning scenarios and what they feel the future holds in store for us concerning the use of language centres. Finally, by uniting the strands of the student’s perspective of one particular case and ideas from the literature, this paper attempts to give a clear picture of what a language centre contributes to academic life with the aim of contributing to the discussion of what the future holds for these centres.