Wiedeman encountered by accident, a most welcome suprize!

I just found a seminal philosophical paper by Dr Albert Wiedeman, the South African applied-linguistics thinker, Unit for Academic Literacy, University of Pretoria. It's the first time I had read any of his work that relates his philosophizing to his specialist discipline of language-learning design and the field of applied linguistics.

The paper: "A systematically significant episode in applied linguistics" (2006) PDF secured. It was published in a symposium Time and context relevant philosophy, a special edition of Journal for Christian Scholarship #42 (Nov 2k6) pp 231-244. The editors for this special were LOK Lategan and JH Smit.

I found Wiedeman's analytic piece impressive from two angles. First, I have a TESOL Certificate, for training to be teacher of English as a 2nd language (I tawt for a while; and I was a public-performance poet for a while). Second, Wiedeman is an advocate of reformational philosophy as established in the life-works of Doooyeweerd and Vollenhoven (who disagreed on a whole lot, despite their foundational labours toward a non-biblistic Protestant Christian philosophy for all ("reformational-ecumenical"). The foregoing formulation acknowledges a certain religious particularity. Not often well regarded these days, but not illegal either. Language-wise, this refilosofy (my coinage, AFG) was born in Dutch (Nederlandse), leaped into English (the more-or-less World Language) and is blogging in these two of its main languages, now blogging also in Spanish. Of course, language-diversity and the criss-cross of politics of change were simultaneously part of the South African experience for the small group who participated in reformational philosophizing there. Not only are the English and Afrikaans languages present, but of greater historical duration and mutation the many tribal languages of South Africa challenge a practioner and theoretician of applied linguistics.

Albert Gedraitis