Over the past twenty years, computers have been used with ESL/EFL students in a number of ways, mostly involving reading, grammar, or word processing software. Since the early 1990s, networks have been used to access the Internet in the form of electronic mail, discussion lists, and multiple object oriented interfaces (MOOs), a system by which Internet users converse and move around a virtual world (Davies, Shield, & Weininger, 1998). More recently, local area networks (LANs) have been used to link all the computers in a classroom without accessing the World Wide Web (WWW). With LANs, students are able to take part in real-time conferences, in which all participants are logged onto a closed network at the same time. The purpose of this paper is to discuss four pedagogic advantages of using LANs in Japanese EFL classrooms: (1) students can actively take part in discussions at their own pace; (2) large numbers of students can communicate at the same time; (3) students use language in meaningful ways; and (4) LANs can be used flexibly in a number of different configurations.