Listening and Speaking Skills
What this section tests
Listening and speaking in Setswana is assessed through comprehension of spoken passages and control of oral conventions: greetings, turn-taking, register (formal vs informal), tone, and pronunciation of consonant clusters such as tlh, tsh, kg, ng'. You must follow a spoken or reported dialogue and identify who said what, why, and with what attitude.
Concepts to master
- Register: Dumela ntate/mma (respectful) versus casual greetings among peers; knowing when wena is rude.
- Politeness formulas: requests with ka kopo, tsweetswee; refusals softened with ke maswabi.
- Turn-taking and reported speech: recognising a re, a botsa, a araba when a passage narrates a conversation.
- Intonation and meaning: the same words can be a statement or question; listen for the question particle a at the start (A o a tsamaya?).
Common traps
Questions often test who is speaking to whom, not just content. A passage may use respectful plural forms (lona, bona) for one person, and candidates misread this as many people. Another trap is mistaking a polite indirect request (A o ka nthusa?) for a plain question. Also watch for homophones and near-identical verbs (e.g. go bona see vs go bôna - tone and context distinguish them).
Rule of thumb
When a dialogue is reported, map each line to a speaker and a purpose (greet, ask, refuse, thank) before answering. If a question asks for the speaker's attitude, look for evaluative words such as ke a leboga, ke maswabi, ga ke itse.
Worked example
“Dumela mma. A nka go botsa gore sekolo se bulwa leng?” - The respectful address mma and the polite A nka go botsa show a formal request to a woman. The answer to “what is the speaker doing?” is: politely asking when school opens, not greeting only.