180 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
6 S11: is it eh the north part of south america or at the south part of
south america south america
S12: it’s in the ahm—middle yes in the middle
S11: the centre
S12: the centre
7 S9: so perhaps erm—is it a big one—or is it erm—is it bigger than
our country
S12: no, it’s shorter
S9: it’s shorter
So here we find normal three-part exchanges, with students not only handling
Initiating moves quite competently, but also naturally supplying the third,
Follow-up move. In the absence of the teacher, their interaction becomes far
richer, at the level of both exchange and move.
The question is, should such replication activities be classified as Inner
or Outer? There are arguments both ways; but intuitively one feels that
since they too are language learning activities, students still approach them
with a language learning ‘mental set’ and as such they should be on the
Inner. But they are certainly not Inner Dependent, and neither could they be
classified on the Inner Independent as ‘pseudo-interaction’. From initial,
informal observations, and analysis of replication activities such as the one
in Example 7 above, it seems that they are far freer, and richer in move