The teaching of an 'imperialist' language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective renders inadequate, on the one hand, the pedalinguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages.To address the second issue first, there is some confusion in the object of attack in the postcolonial demonization of hegemonic language, a confusion between 'English' referring to the language, and 'English' referring to the people and culture of Great Britain. Clearly the ideological assault against English is now a misnomer, because most of the hostility toward globalization is no longer directed against the English (who have ceased to command an empire on which the sun never sets), but rather against the United States, and against that branch of 'Ameringlish' which dominates the world through the pervasive influence of the US media. English, nowadays, is no longer as English as the English.The first issue, of conceiving the project of English being taught as a foreign language (EFL) or as a second language (ESL), significantly misprizes the situation, since English, with its global reach, is often not an entirely closed book to its learners, and students are not being taught English as either a foreign or as a second language. Another category needs to be recognized, to which I give the acronym TUE, which stands for 'Teaching Unbroken English'. For the purposes of my own analysis, I focus on my experience teaching English in Hong Kong, before and after 1997, during the end of the colonial and the beginning of the postcolonial era.As I have indicated in an earlier essay (Eoyang, 1999), it is both true and untrue that English is a global language. If by 'global language' we infer that everyone in the world is fluent in English, that is, of course, far from the truth. If we hedge and Downloaded from say that some form of English is used more than any other language as the lingua franca in the world, no one, I think, would object. I agree with the Japanese businessman who rejected the claim that English was the global language: 'English is not the global language,' he said. 'Broken English is the global language.'