SAY WHAT?

Teaching English has become one heck of a big industry around the globe (just check out www.daveseslcafe.com to see how big), but if you're not white and from Canada, America, England, Australia or New Zealand, you might have difficulty in getting a gig in developing countries like Cambodia.

I'm not sure it's racism. If it is, it's a kind of benign racism, if such a thing is possible. Meaning, for some reason that eludes, the thinking is: white skin = native speaker of English. The people who are acting racist don't actually know they're acting racist, if that makes sense. (Which I guess makes it even more racist, doesn't it.) If you're black, they might not hire you simply because they don't think you actually grew up speaking the language; again, the thinking is that white skin equals native speaker. Period. Being a black or African English teacher in this part of the world isn't impossible, no, but it ain't too easy, let me tell you.

Similiarly, if you're from a country like the Phillipines, they might decide not to hire you because English technically isn't a native language there, even though most Filipinos speak better English and can teach better English than half the Canadians I know.

A lot of this unconscious (?) predjudice has to do with accent. English language learners are paranoid that they have to learn from teachers who speak the Queen's English, and that if they learn the language from someone who doesn't speak exactly like the Queen Mum, then they're screwed, their linguistic future having been lost to the wind, their money burned to a black and pointless crisp.

Doesn't work that way.

The fact is, English is a global language, spoken with extremely different accents not only in every country, but usually in different parts of each country as well. (You ever heard a Nova Scotia or Newfoundland accent? Or an authentic Alabama one?)

If you learn English from someone with a slightly odd accent, it makes you listen harder. It forces you to listen closer. It engages you in a way that may not be easy at first, no, but it will actually improve your overall comprehension ability. And in a place like Cambodia, many students will eventually try to get a job at an international NGO, where the people speaking English will be from places like Sweden and Germany and Finland and Norway, and guess what? Their accents will be thick as molasses. If students aren't accustomed to hearing English in somewhat altered, even eccentric ways, they're in big trouble.

Language is a commodity that is bought, sold, traded and given away, free of charge. It does not belong to a particular national group, let alone race. It arises from a particular place and time, true, but once you learn it, it becomes your currency, and you will add to it your own shadings, nuances and pathways to its presentation. It becomes personal, individual and possessive. To limit the teaching of English to solely those individuals who were lucky enough to have been born into its daily use is to deny the willing learner of the essence of language itself -- namely, its magical, slightly mysterious ability to seize hold of the foreigner, the novice, the illiterate, and slowly, gradually make its powerful presence heard, then felt.