The paper investigates EFL teacher's role in a smart learning environment (SLE) which uses education technologies to provide essential tools for teachers to personalize teaching, adjust teaching and assessment, and create authentic learning environments for students. SLEs are aimed at using technology to bring real life experiences into the classroom to engage students, and prepare them for life-long education and future careers in a way that traditional practices often fail to do. The study was designed to review a vast amount of literature devoted to the potential of SLEs and teacher's role in these learning settings and propose a model for EFL teacher's multiple roles in SLE.

The purpose of this article is to define the functions of the teacher as the organizer of chat communication, which has become one of the foundations of Internet communication. The leading method for the study of this problem is the method of situational modeling, which allows considering chat-communication as a process of new social interaction, requiring the leading role of the teacher-organizer, ensuring the maximum involvement of all participants-communicators in this process in order to assimilate new knowledge by the perceiver (learners). This article presents new methodological methods of teacher's work within the framework of chat-communication, defines the important functions of a teacher, who communicates knowledge in the changed socio-cultural environment. The presented methodological material is designed to help teachers of higher education to use chat-communication as a new channel of knowledge transfer from a teacher to a student to adapt to the new communicative realities, to give awareness of the continuity of the educational process, even in a situation of significant changes in conditions of its implementation.   Keywords: distance learning, higher education, internet communication, chatting, teacher functions