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Teachers need creative strategies and techniques when teaching idioms in Setswana. However, they do not know what idioms are nor are they aware that through idioms cultural heritage can be preserved and that idioms can be taught as part of imaginative language, especially in Grade 3. As a result, teachers and learners in Grade 3 Setswana classes lack the understanding of the role of idioms and language proficiency in using and writing idioms. The aim of this paper was to show how intervention could help teachers with new strategies for teaching idioms. Constructivism and the five subtheories of decoding idioms were used (Liu 2008). The project consisted of two research-based phases and the findings showed that teachers can now use their own initiative and creativity in language teaching and the learners learned and retained the idioms they have learnt.

This article takes a critical look at the role played by second language teaching methods used in teaching African languages as first languages. The traditional method of teaching, used before 1984, encouraged rote learning and teacher-centred lessons. This did not foster the use of dictionaries and, if they were used, the lack of a dictionary culture made their use ineffective.Teachers should be well versed in the functional approach, introduced in 1984, to ensure a smooth transition to Outcomes Based Eductation (OBE). Although its inception since 1994 offers a greater scope for using dictionaries, teachers are still unsure about how the syllabi should be implemented.This, together with the lack of a dictionary culture, results in an inadequate and ineffective dictionary use. Some suggestions are made how this situation could be rectified.

Some Sepedi authors perceive women as having to be confined to the home to only perform maternal duties, and women are ridiculed for not being able to fulfill the responsibilities of womanhood. This perception extends to community members who criticise women for not living up to ethnic and cultural expectations. Some books which portray women negatively are still prescribed and read in schools and universities, thereby perpetuating these stereotypes among the youth. This article aims at establishing whether or not laziness is a hindrance to maternal duties and to compare it with modern society's expectations of married women. The ethnographic design and comparative analyses were used in which Moelelwa, as a character, served as a guide for understanding the issue of stereotyping women and laziness in the past and in the modern era. The cultural theory which discusses how cultural values and rituals play an important role in acculturation and enculturation processes has been employed for comparison between Sepedi, seSwati and modern cultural ways of being. The findings show that women in traditional settings are subjected to this labelling, whereas modern career women avoid this criticism by making use of helpers in their homes. The study illustrates that women are not necessarily lazy if they do not perform their domestic roles. The recommendation is that some of the Sepedi classics could be revived by being used in comparative studies as was done with Moelelwa.