Preparing for task: Linguistic formats for procedural instructions in early years schooling

•Classroom procedural instructions occur in a range of formats.•Grammatical formats are contingent on interplays of action type and deontic positioning.•The authority of the instruction is derived from the teacher or the wider curriculum. This paper presents an analysis of the linguistic design of teacher turns that can be characterised as procedural instructions. Adopting an Interactional Linguistic framework, we examine a corpus of around 100h of classroom interaction in early years classrooms in Australia. Procedural instructions were delivered to the whole class during ‘carpet time’, and are used to direct students to follow the steps of a planned activity in a subsequent phase of the lesson. Unlike previous studies of the linguistic formats of teacher directives, these procedural instructions were predominantly found to occur in declarative formats of various kinds (future or present tense, modalised), rather than imperatives. However, there is a range of formats for procedural instructions found over the corpus, and it is shown how their linguistic design linguistic design is highly sensitive to the kinds of actions being undertaken and to the local contingencies in which such actions appear in the course of classroom interaction.