INTRODUCTION

Organizations have been defined by Dawson (1986, p. xviii) as:

As we saw in Chapter 1, there are many kinds of LTO, and as organizations they take on many forms, as shown in these examples:

• • a small, fairly new private language school in a European town: focused on teaching English and other languages to that city’s middle-class residents, staffed by its founder/owner/director/teacher, two other teachers, and an administrator

• • an English Language Support Unit in a large English-medium university in the Middle East: providing academically focused English language classes for incoming students, the unit exists as a non-faculty department of the university

• • a school which exists to provide support for refugee resettlement in the United States: funding comes from federal and state government, and the school provides English and vocational courses

• •an English school in Japan: employing 40 teachers and 12 admin staff, it exists as part of a large nationwide chain

• •an Intensive English Program in the US: based on a university campus and serving the non-native-English speaking population of the college, the IEP is run as an outsourced business, not affiliated with the university in any way

• •a British Council teaching centre in a provincial city: the centre itself is semi-autonomous, but the DOS’s manager operates out of the office in the capital city, and the global organization offers a number of benefits and imposes a number of restrictions on activities

• •a language school in a major European capital: established 20 years ago as a small business, and since expanding to employ more than 50 teachers spread over five branches throughout the city.

Looking at the definition and the examples of different language teaching organizations that began this chapter, it can be seen that all clearly fit the definition of an organization despite the great dissimilarities among them.