Language Choice in a Nation Under Transition: English Language Spread in Cambodia

Thomas Clayton

Jun 2006 · Language Policy Book 5 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

Language Choice in a Nation under Transition charts the spread of English into Cambodia and the French efforts to contest this spread in favor of their own language through an analysis of the country's recent history. This book proposes a synthesis of the national-functional and international-critical perspectives. This synthesis emerges from the Cambodian experience and thus adheres to Joshua Fishman's admonition that theory reflect the "sharp bite of local detail and unique historical experience."

About the author

Thomas Clayton is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Kentucky, U.S.A., where he teaches classes in applied linguistics and directs the Master of Arts in English with a Concentration in Teaching English as a Second Language Program. Professor Clayton has published more than two dozen articles on language and educational policy issues, often in the Cambodian context, in books and journals. In 1991, Clayton established the first U.S. university educational program in postwar Cambodia, the English Language Teaching Center for the State University of New York at Buffalo at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute. In 2000, he taught at the Faculty of Law and Economics in Phnom Penh as the first-ever Fulbright scholar to Cambodia.