A broad communicative repertoire can help university lecturers to motivate and engage diverse student populations. The aim of this study is to develop and explore the usefulness and validity of a tool to identify patterns in lecturers' verbal repertoire. Speech act theory is presented as a framework to study lecturers' verbal communication during teaching. A description of the tool and the analysis of verbal actions are presented. In order to explore the validity, patterns of 12 university lecturers' verbal actions during instruction were examined. Characteristic speech act sequences were identified, similar sequences were clustered and associations with other teaching behaviours were explored to analyse the construct validity. We explain the instrument in detail to assist future use and we discuss to what extent it can provide ways to reflect on lecturers' verbal repertoire in action.