This talk is about the spoken language that instructors at a vocational institution use to communicate with their students. It discusses how the technical language of the trades is passed on to students through listening to their instructors and engaging in talk with them. It firstly considers the discourse features of the instructor’s talk that assist in engaging learners in the language, concepts and process skills of their trades. It then focuses on the lexis of the language that instructors use, and what instructors do to support learners’ acquisition of this lexis.