Michael Batson

The road most travelled in Cambodia work wise for expats is the world of foreign language teaching mainly English, but also as a former colony French, and these days to a lesser extent Korean and no doubt, Chinese. But most plunge into the world of English language teaching in a plethora of institutions, some functional and some not so functional, attracting an equally diverse range of candidates some of who are qualified and may even be competent, but invariably a larger number of chancers, wannabees and has beens. Many of these probably should be somewhere else doing something else, and well away from students and their money. English language teaching in Cambodia is a murky world and seems entirely unregulated. This is due to Cambodia itself, having to drag itself out of the mire of years of civil war and eager to develop, it’s young population keen to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, which in itself is only to be admired. Unfortunately, this predicament lends itself to abuse in a country where if laws do exist, they are sometimes poorly enforced and easy to ignore. For the uninitiated, to be qualified as an English language teacher usually requires some sort of tertiary training, a class-based certificate; a CELTA or the more advanced DELTA, taught in accredited language schools the world over but not available in Cambodia. The alternatives are the university courses; Dip TESOL or various certificates, diplomas or degrees in linguistics, which are