Innovation and Leadership in English Language Teaching

Set up as a response to global demand for English language proficiency, English language teaching centers (ELTCs) are the mainstay of a major global education industry that is particularly well established in “inner circle” countries (Edwards, 2004) such as Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. ELTCs are English language teaching (ELT) providers that offer courses to paying, non-native speaker students, and are staffed by teachers with specialist qualifications in English as a second language (ESL). Typically, ELTCs are either privately owned companies or entities subsumed within colleges, faculties, or schools of universities or polytechnics. Since ELTCs are set up to make a profit for their owners, they are a good example of the fusion of the educational and the commercial imperatives. The application of business style management and marketing models to the administration of educational programs (Barlow, 1994; Greenwood & Gaunt, 1994) has been a discernible trend in recent times. The fact that general management and administrative theory is effectively transferable to an educational setting has gained wider acceptance in ELT circles (Savage, 1996). This is evident from, for example, the existence of an International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) ELT Management Special Interest Group (SIG) and newsletter, the publication of a number of textbooks on ELT management (e.g., Impey & Underhill, 1994; Pennington, 1991; White, Hockley, van der Horst Jansen, & Laughner, 2008), the gradual appearance of articles in ELT journals written from a management or quasi-management perspective, some of which report empirical research (e.g., Bordia, Wales, Pittam, & Gallois, 2006; Crichton, 1994; Stoller & Christison, 1994; Waites & Wild, 1992), as well as universities offering tertiary qualifications in ELT management.