Echo reading
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I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry recently upon discovering a video from the University of Canberra called “Echo Reading”.
OK, I thought, Whole Language/Balanced Literacy has finally jumped the shark.
In this video, an adult reads a book that is too hard for a student aloud, pausing after each sentence for the student to repeat the sentence:
If you are the sort of person inclined to notice things such as emperors not having any clothes, you will have noticed that all the student has to be able to do to succeed at “Echo Reading” is be able to repeat spoken sentences. They don’t even have to look at the text.
In Speech Pathology and linguistics circles, we call this skill “verbal imitation”. Not “reading”.
I found another Echo Reading video on the internet in which an instructor actively discourages a child’s attempts at independent decoding, and encourages the child to listen and copy what she says, in the name of fluency:
In neither video was there any tracking of text with a finger, or apparent expectation or requirement for the student to decode, although in the second video, the child clearly could decode pretty well, and kept trying to do so.
In another Echo Reading demonstration the teacher does point to the words and encourages the child to do so on his turn. So at least she knew the child was looking at the words, though it’s not clear from the video whether he could decode them himself, or was just copying her spoken words and her pointing.
Another video shows a teacher reading a repetitive “Big book” to a class, and then she gets them to “Echo Read” it. Again, she points to the words, but as the print is small, the group is large and young, and many of the words are quite hard (“butterfly”, “giraffe”, “elephant”, “orange”), so most children are probably just verbally imitating, not reading.
In another video called Choral and Echo Reading, the emphasis seems to be encouraging a child to decode with or after an adult, using books that seem to be around or a little above the child’s decoding level.
So this is better than the previous videos, but instead of helping the child sound out words, and pointing out useful patterns like the “ay” in “strays”, the teacher just says whole words for her. Yet this child clearly knows a bit about sounding out, and might have been helped to blend “s+t+r+ay+s”, she might even know the “ay” pattern since she did seem to decode the word “stays” (but perhaps she just remembered when the teacher said it).
I also found a video in which Echo Reading was used to teach a child who could already decode the text to read with more expression:
I don’t have any problem with Echo Reading used like this, as a strategy for improving phrasing and reading expression in children who can already decode. Indeed a brief Google Scholar search suggests that this might have been the original point of Echo Reading, if only I were an academic, I’d be able to easily access the articles, and tell you more (late edit: see Mary Gladstone’s comment below for details of the origins of Echo Reading. Thanks, Mary!)
A teaching strategy is only as good as the theory or rationale behind it. I was teaching a six-year-old stutterer to speak smoothly and slowly yesterday, so I got out a book containing short words, simple spellings and an interesting story, and read it sentence by sentence to him, and got him to copy the way I was talking. I guess some people watching would have called that Echo Reading. I wouldn’t, the purpose of the activity was smooth speech.
Any use of Echo Reading as a substitute for decoding, a means of discouraging decoding or a means of encouraging children to memorise whole written words rather than decode them, is really very worrying. Children need to learn to decode to become successful readers.
I also don’t see how Echo Reading “is a great strategy to take the stress and anxiety out of reading together”, as suggested in the first video.
The struggling readers I know aren’t interested in engaging in reading-like-behaviour, they’re interested in actually learning to read. They will probably be stressed and anxious until they can do it, and fair enough. The best way to reduce their stress and anxiety is to get their reading foundations in i.e. teach them to decode. Once they can decode a bit, they’re the ones nagging you for time to do more practice.
Instead of “Echo Reading”, students with poor decoding skills should be doing two separate reading activities:
1. Reading books containing the sounds and spellings they have been taught. As additional sounds and spellings are mastered, books which include them can be tackled. A list of books with simplified spellings intended for this purpose, and suitable for a range of ages, is here.
2. Listening to adults read interesting books that are too hard for them to read independently, for comprehension, vocabulary and enjoyment. There’s no need to say every line twice. That would just be annoying and mess up the story.
13 responses to “Echo reading”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Rea Reason and Rene Boote (1994) used this method which they adapted from Young and Tyre,1983) to help children with specific difficulties. It was a 15 minute activity done daily. It wasn’t developed to teach children how to read. They called it Chorus reading.
It had 6 stages: talk about the characters and story so far (2 mins), read the passage aloud with expression running a finger along the line of print (3 mins), read passage again with child joining in (3 mins), read the passage again together but this time pause occasionally for child to read the next word/phrase when you feel certain they can carry on (3 mins), the child reads the passage aloud, supply word or phrase if they hesitate (3 mins), praise the child for joining in for reading with expression for supplying the right word and for effort.
The books used for this were meant to be below their level of reading ability.
Are we taking a method developed to be used with children with specific learning difficulties, reinventing it to use to ‘teach’ reading. When will we listen to the research?
Thanks so much for this background, Mary. Amazing how something that does make sense can morph into something that simply doesn’t.
Hi Alison,
I agree that echo reading could possibly be useful as a way to model fluent, expressive reading for students who can decode the text, but do so laboriously and word by word. But its use in these videos is deeply problematic.
I recently came across an article defending the kindergarten expectations of the Common Core State Standards here in the US. There had been a recent report that claimed that it is not ‘developmentally appropriate’ to begin reading instruction in kindergarten (typically age 5-6). I disagree and so does the author, but I was surprised to read that his interpretation of the standard “Read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding” was basically this same kind of echo reading. He says it is based on “New Zealand educator Don Holdaway’s classic “for-with-by model” to simulate “lap reading” with babies and toddlers. This teaching method has been used successfully in kindergartens for decades. The emergent-reader text is first modeled by the teacher for the students, then joyfully read over and over with the students, until eventually the easy book is independently read by the students with great joy and confidence.” He calls it a “memory reading” jump start and compares it to training wheels.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/raising-readers-writers-and-spellers/201502/ode-common-core-kindergarten-standards
This was not my understanding of the standard, so I guess I’ll have to clarify it with some Common Core experts here, but I thought I’d share it because it reminded me of your echo reading post.
Also, it seems that “in the name of fluency”, teachers sometimes push kids to read faster than they’re ready to do, or to just read with exaggerated expression and call that fluency. I think fluency develops as decoding gets more automatic with lots of practice. Hearing lots of models of fluent reading helps and some repeated reading and phrase-cued reading can be very helpful for kids who struggle. Do you have any favorite ways to develop fluency?
Thanks!
Hi Miriam, I still have a problem with the term “memory reading” because the child is not reading, they are just verbally imitating and memorising. To me, getting the words off the page (whether decoding or, once a word’s been decoded enough times, recognising it) is a non-negotiable part of reading. If someone else is getting the words off the page for you, you’re not reading. I agree that fluency can’t happen till you can decode, so my favourite way to develop fluency in the first instance is to get the child decoding really well. I don’t usually get to do a lot of specific work on fluency, because as a Speech Pathologist I usually only see the student for one session per week or per fortnight for a short period, and must equip and rely on parents and aides to do the bulk of the work on a day-to-day basis. As soon as a student is reasonably competent at reading decodable books containing a variety of vowel spellings and some multi-syllable words, they tend to get pushed out the door by someone else who can’t decode at all or has other major communication needs. The intellectually disabled ones then work with their aide who I talk to over lunch if they need help/ideas, and the rest including the language-impaired students, who now get no funding in this state, usually have sink or swim at school, unless they are in a classroom with another student who has an aide and can all work together. I suggest repeated readings and timing oneself to get a Personal Best etc for fluency, and recommend a range of texts for building fluency/comprehension/vocabulary, but my main job is usually getting the kid off the ground in decoding and encoding. A lot of my students come from refugee backgrounds so are also on a serious vocabulary-learning curve too, so we are teaching them vocabulary (in my workbooks via the pictures and example sentences for each word, and we use Google Images a lot when reading to help explain vocab) as well as how to sound out and spell words.
I’m thinking of using echo reading for a child who has been learning to decode for the last few years, and can decode slowly, but struggles with confidence to read sentences, even when parts of the page are covered, or phrases are written outside the book.
They’re neurodiverse and demand avoidant, probably some trauma from struggling, and more likely to engage with single-word games, word chaining, etc. (but can also be resistant with these).
I don’t want echo reading to replace actual decoding, and will keep working on decoding with words and short phrases, but I think that echo reading (along with finger tracing) might help with confidence, tracking, and reading more words in context of sentences. I hope it could have some of the benefits that rereading has, but help with adding more texts rather than just repeating a few for so long.
The child has always had good PA and spoken language, and vision/convergence are fine too.
I think when you have complex, neurodiverse, demand avoidant kids, sometimes there can be good reasons to use strategies that you wouldn’t use with other kids, so as long as you’re clear on what the goal is, and aren’t confusing verbal imitation with reading, all good. Alison
There is evidence that Read to Impress is effective as a tier 3 intervention.
Dr Chase Young (associate professor at Sam Houston State University) researched
Read to impress intervention one to one to teach struggling readers.
The teacher chooses a text about a year above the instructional level; the teacher and the student begin reading out loud, the teacher reads about a syllable ahead of the student with good expression. The text is chunked, after a paragraph or page in picture book, the student reads back. 15 minutes a day leads to great improvements.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/teaching-literacy-podcast/id1482475731?i=1000456300860
Fluency interventions such as Echo reading and Read to Impress is not used as a substitute for decoding, they are not a means of discouraging decoding or a means of encouraging children to memorise whole written words rather than decode them.
Models such as Scarborough’ reading rope suggest decoding, fluency, vocabulary, oral language, etc all need to be woven together to build reading.
“A teaching strategy is only as good as the theory or rationale behind it.” ?
It was the belief in the Psycholinguistic View of the Fluent Reading Process that blinded believers to the evidence that teaching phonics in an explicit and systematic way improved reading outcomes for students.
Does a phonics approach which focuses mainly on the understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters blind true believers to the evidence that teaching other parts of the reading rope can help struggling readers?
Theories in neuroscience, cognitive science, science of learning, science of reading etc still need research on specific practices to show if that practice assists learning to read. Teaching strategies need to be informed by research into their efficacy not just a belief in the theory or rationale behind them.
Here are a couple of articles that look at this in more detail:
The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading
Nell K. Duke, Kelly B. Cartwright
https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
https://seidenbergreading.net/2022/03/23/i-get-questions/
I think there is resounding agreement that phonemic awareness and phonics are necessary but not sufficient ingredients in teaching reading and that the upper strands of the Reading Rope also matter. The echo reading in the video this blog post about was just verbal imitation, the learner wasn’t learning anything much about reading. But there are authors I respect who say that in some situations, echo reading (which I call verbal imitation, but following the print with their eyes) is justifiable. However, I can’t find the term “echo reading” in either of the reference links you’ve provided, so I assume this is a general comment about reading science, not specific to this blog post.
The reference https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/trtr.1993 is in 5 post (May 12, 2024 at 8:02 pm) “Instructional practices, such as Readers Theatre and choral, echo, and paired reading, that are aimed at improving prosody and other aspects of reading fluency have been shown to positively impact reading comprehension in a number of studies.”
Sorry, wrong link.
https://seidenbergreading.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/rrq-lost-in-translation.pdf
The role of theories and models in ‘the science of reading’ (The Simple View of Reading, Cognitive Load Theory, Cognitive Constructivism, Scarborough’s Rope, ) is partly to help generate hypotheses to test in the classroom.
Tim Shanahan suggests we should have low confidence in any methods for teaching that are based on more general theories but which lack comparative studies on beginning readers as they learn to read. “Instructional practices, such as Readers Theatre and choral, echo, and paired reading, that are aimed at improving prosody and other aspects of reading fluency have been shown to positively impact reading comprehension in a number of studies.” (1) It would be helpful to carry out more research and develop better theories to gain a better understanding of what’s going on here.
It is interesting to look at the relationship between theory and evidence based practice in other branches of science. The discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder was based on incorrect theories. There are no good theories or rationales about why lithium should work, but it continues to be an important treatment for bipolar disorder when it is prescribed and monitored by people who know what they are doing, that understand dosage, interactions with other medications, benefits of other supports such as psychotherapy and life style changes to support the use of lithium.
(1) https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/trtr.1993
Thank you for listening.
There are a lot of SLPs who have developed reading programs focusing on systematic synthetic phonics(SSP). It is understandable as the influence of whole language and balanced literacy did not serve SLP clients well.
All humans are subject to confirmation bias. It is easier to listen to others who think like us. It is hard to go looking for where we might be wrong. Like minded people gather together and share the evidence that supports their practice.
There is an upcoming Structured Linguistic Literacy (SLL) summit which is a good example of this. John Walker from Sounds~Write will give a talk about the integration of vocabulary, etymology and morphology in SLL. I am interested to listen to this and compare it with the ideas of others (such as Pete Bowers who has a long history of research and teaching about the integration of morphology, etymology and phonology).
It is difficult for anyone who has written, marketed and defended a program, thesis or book to seek out evidence which challenges their work. It can be unpleasant and exhausting to actively listen to someone who has another point of view.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/social-science-bites/id524122804?i=1000651170782