How to pronounce the Japanese connecting word 々

As far as I know, this is used in Japanese to take the place of a second same character. “People” is usually written 人々, using 人 with the mark 々 preceeding it, rather than 人人, using the same symbol twice. I believe 々is called an ‘iteration mark’.

Thanks Richardhenry. Yes, as I said, I am very aware of how it is used and why. What I am looking for specifically is what the contraction mark is formally called in Japanese. I have heard that most school children just pronounce it as くりかえし、
or “repeating”. What I am looking for is a definitive grammatical or orthographic term such as the one you suggested (iteration mark), but in Japanese.
Any Japanese language scholars?

source:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/々

The mark is called 漢字返し (kanji-gaeshi, kanji repeater) or 同の字点 (dōnoji-ten, same-character mark) in Japanese, or noma since it looks like a combination of the katakana ノマ no ma.