Inner and outer 181structure, than the present ‘pseudo-interaction’. One solution might be to
introduce a fourth column, subdividing the Inner Independent into ‘Pseudo’
and ‘Free’, which would then give us:
One would expect that the Free column would be even far more complex
than the Outer in exchange and move structure; with no central teacher
control, the students in the group need to negotiate roles and control of
turn-taking and topic among themselves. The Free column might possibly
be far more heavily used in a lesson based on communicative activities than
the Outer, or indeed the other Inner columns.
Different again from the activities described by Willis and Warren (1985)
above is the type of lesson taught during the Bangalore Project, following
what Prabhu terms a ‘procedural’ syllabus (Prabhu 1987). This consists
solely of tasks of different types, that students work on individually after an
initial run-through with a similar example with the teacher, very much in
the same way as a maths teacher introduces a new type of maths problem.
Here there is no explicit focus on language at all at any stage; the resulting
interaction resembles that of a ‘content’ lesson and would be coded as
Outer.
IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS OF
THE FUTURE: WHAT SHOULD CLASSROOM OBSERVERS
BE LOOKING FOR?
In the 1990s, as students become even more aware of the need to become
fluent in English and to cope with the flow of natural speech, there is
likely to be a greater demand for replication activities to allow learners to
practice communicating in the classroom, not simply at utterance level,
but at discourse level, taking responsibility for their own turn-taking and
negotiating their own way through a complete interaction. Even so, the
majority of lessons I have observed over the last year (1990–1) have
contained more citation and simulation activities than replication. In some
cases students are left free to carry out a task on their own in groups
(replication, classifiable as Inner Independent Free), but during the subsequent
‘reporting back’ phase are expected to produce utterances conforming to
a pre-set structural pattern, which turns the activity back into a citation
activity, on the Inner level.