Albert Weideman (b 1948) holds postgraduate qualifications from the University of Essex, where he completed the M.A. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (cum laude) in 1983, and from the University of the Free State, where, in 1987, he was awarded the D. Litt. for a thesis with the title: Applied linguistics as a discipline of design: A foundational study.
Formerly general manager (education) of the Urban Foundation in the Free State, he was also director of Language Methods and Programmes (L-MAP), a teacher development agency operating in the Western and Eastern Cape, and the Free State. He was secretary of the Free State Education Forum, an initiative that sought to unite, after 1990, the many education departments in the province. In 1992 he headed up the education component of an IDASA-sponsored visit of Free State stakeholders to Zimbabwe and Zambia. During this period, he was also chairperson of the Primary Science Programme regional board, serving two terms on their national Board of Trustees.
Until June 1996 he was director of the Centre for Education Development (CENEDUS) of the University of Stellenbosch. Between 1998 and 2001 he was Director: Professional Programmes in the Faculty of Education of the University of the Western Cape, where he participated in two large-scale teacher development projects for senior educationists from Namibia and Eritrea, and secured funds from the Open Society Foundation for Teach Africa, a teacher mentoring project. He is a former director of the Unit for Academic Literacy of the University of Pretoria, and is currently professor and head of the Department of English of the University of the Free State. He is the chief executive of the Inter-Institutional Centre for Language Development and Assessment (ICELDA), a formal partnership between Northwest University, the Universities of the Free State and Pretoria, and the University of Stellenbosch, that develops and researches language tests.
He has experience of financial management, serving as senate representative on the Finance committee of the UWC council, and, before that, establishing the Western Cape offices of King Finance (now African Bank). At UWC, he was also chairperson of the Board of trustees of the staff pension fund, and at the UFS the chairperson of the Finance Committee of the Faculty of the Humanities.
He is an NRF-rated researcher, has published more than fifty articles in national as well as in international journals, and is the author and editor of several books. He has served on the executive of the Southern African Applied Linguistics Association, and is a member of three editorial boards of accredited journals. He has presented guest lectures at the Universities of Duisburg, Leuven, Minnesota, Alberta, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Antwerp, Tilburg, the Radboud University of Nijmegen, Groningen, and the National University of Singapore.
His strengths include the ability to vividly articulate to others an image of the future, an ability to keep a team focussed, and the capacity to digest difficult information and present it in an intelligible format to others.