Nathaniel Chew ’19

15 December 2020

Email: nathanielchew@gmail.com

Comps Title: Reanalyzing the Past: An Experimental Study on Non-standard -ed in Singapore Colloquial English

Current Employment: Manager, Planning and Foresight at the National Library Board, Singapore

“One morsel of advice for current majors: if there’s something you wish you could learn that no one’s teaching a class on, go forth and learn it anyway! Talk to your professors about creating a new class, or doing an independent study, or pointing you in the direction of some books. Find online communities of learning and practice. Do some extremely informal field work.

“I have tremendous appreciation for the structured Linguistics education I had at Carleton (and the wonderful professors who taught me), but some of the most joy I had (and continue to have) was down the rabbit hole of sociolinguistic analyses of memes or language revitalization efforts in Singaporean literature, etc. Comps is a great Big way to explore something like that, but it doesn’t have to be the only way!

“Something I’m currently puzzling through as a librarian in the public service: how do I navigate prescriptivism in language and literacy education, even as fluency in Standard English is a critical material resource for the underprivileged patrons I work with? It’s a lesson in progress.”