Differences between Teachers’ Written Instructions and Their Subsequent Spoken Instructions for the Same Tasks

Instructions are what English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers use in order to draw students’ attention to a task, engage them in the task, run classroom activities, and prompt them to provide a product for the purposes of assessment. The focus of this descriptive, naturalistic, and observational study is to explore how the teachers use written instructions and their subsequent spoken instructions given by the same EFL teachers for the same tasks. The data were gathered from two classroom teaching episodes of two EFL teachers to see how verbal instructions compliment written instructions. An analysis of the features of the EFL teachers’ written instructions and their subsequent spoken instructions reveals that there are many different spoken instruction features used to enhance written instructions. These features result ultimately in the students understanding the task requirements. The findings can be useful for lesson preparation and for raising teachers’ awareness that spoken instructions provide features which enhance students’ understanding of the written instructions for a task.