‘Echo reading is when the adult reads a short segment of text aloud and the children echo the reading back.’

Echo reading is a re- reading strategy designed to help students develop expressive, fluent reading as well as used for print knowledge. In echo reading, the teacher reads a short segment of text, sometimes a sentence or short paragraph, and the children echo it back. “Echo reading works best for short segments of text as particularly well-suited for beginning readers” (Jennings, Caldwell, and Lerner, 2014).

It is important that the child- reader follow the text when the adult is reading and when they echo the adult’s reading back to them, so each child needs their own copy of the text. Alternatively, you could use a big book or enlarge and project a text onto a screen. If it is helpful, let the children point at the word as you – and then they – read it, but be careful to make sure that they do not cover other words or the rest of the line. Remember we want to encourage fluent reading of a meaningful phrase or ‘chunk’ of words, not word by word reading.

• Using an appropriate text, the adult reads the whole section to the group, making the reading sound interesting and expressive and paying attention to ‘clues’ – mainly punctuation clues like commas and full stops to begin with.
• Then re-read a short segment of text to the group, modelling fluent reading. This may be a complete sentence or a phrase or clause in a particularly long sentence. It is important that the segment is meaningful, it must make sense.
• The children then repeat or echo the segment of text that the adult has just read
• Then the adult does the same with the next short segment of text, stopping at an appropriate place. Once again the children echo the adult’s reading
• This continues until the section of text is completed
• If some of the children are finding it difficult to follow the text or to read along with the others, then there is no problem to repeat a segment. The adult might slow down the modelled reading so that the echoed reading is also slower

Children can also use the echo reading technique during the practise stage of the lesson. Working in pairs they can take it in turns to lead their partner through the text, using a call and response or echo approach.