French students of all disciplines are frequently in contact with English through English-language television series, music or social networking. This online informal learning of English (OILE) appears to involve most students majoring in subjects other than English (Toffoli & Sockett 2010). Participating in such activities positively affects vocabulary recognition (Kusyk & Sockett 2012) and leads, in some elicited writing, to increased use of language chunks acquired in informal contexts (Sockett 2014). A recent report by the European Commission (2012) confirms that informal out-of-classroom contact with a foreign language plays an important role in the acquisition of the target language. It would therefore appear necessary to consider in what ways university language centres can adapt in order to take these phenomena into account. Their challenge is to remain pertinent in a context where students interact with other English-language users in the private sphere, procuring authentic target-language resources for themselves on their own equipment.