How VET teacher talk engages students and builds a professional trades identity. Presented at 8th annual conference on VET teaching and VET teacher education. Australian council of deans of education vocational education group

This talk draws on a study of language use in a polytechnic institution in New Zealand. The study tool place from 2014- 2017. A corpus of 450,000 words of teaching in the classroom, workshop or building site were recorded and transcribed. The talk considers how vocational instructors use talk to engage students in the content of their lessons. It looks at how subtle features of teacher talk build students’ professional identity. The features of student talk considered are the use of tag questions, address terms, personal pronouns, and the use of affective language.