Liceo Cultural Britanico

Student: Cynthia Randerath

Observation 5
“Language Echoes”
From “Classroom Observation Tasks” by Ruth Wajnryb

Level: 1st year

School A
Number of students: 14
Duration: 40 minutes

“Echoes” are the teacher utterances which echo students´ responses but produce no
response themselves. They are in fact “dead ends” (“Classroom Observation tasks” by
Ruth Wajnryb)

These are some of the echoes I collected in this lesson:

1) Student: I use my cell phone to set my alarm clock.

Teacher: You use your cell phone to set your alarm clock.
2) Student: I use it to call my parents when I travel. Teacher:
you use it to call your parents.
3) Student: Some time ago we used those symbols.
Teacher: Some time ago you used those symbols.

 In approximately 15 minutes I could collect 3 echoes. The interesting thing is

that, in my view, the teacher was absolutely unconscious about her using echoes.

 It is very difficult to think about the effects of using echoes on the learner,
because I do not know if the learner is aware of it as well. However, I think that
if the learner realizes about the echo, he might think that he made a mistake and
can start thinking about what he has just produced.
As regards classroom interaction, echoes can stop the communicative flow,
because they do not add anything new or anything that keeps conversation going
on. They just repeat a previous utterance and this cuts the conversation.
Taking into account the learner’s perception of the teacher’s corrective role, I
believe that the learner can think that he is constantly making mistakes. The
students can think that if the teacher repeats everything he says is because he
does not do it correctly. The result can be the learner’s unwillingness to take
risks in future lessons.

 I think that echoes are dead ends, mainly because of what I mentioned before;
they do not help the conversation to continue. In fact, they break the flow and
they do not achieve any result.
  In my view, echoing cannot be taken into account as a way of giving feedback
because it does not provide the student with any correction. The echo just
repeats what the student had said before so it does not count as a way of giving
feedback to the student. When giving feedback students need to be aware of
what they did correct and what they did wrong, so echoes cannot be effective for
them.

 According to Lindstromberg, there are some points in favor of echoing:

- It provides learners with the repetition needed for reinforcement of
language.
- It gets over the problem of contributions from students who speak very
quietly.
- It gets over the problem of poor pronunciation by providing intelligible
versions for the whole class.
- It can be used as a strategy to provide models of correctness in the event
of error.

As regards the first point, I think that there are other ways of providing reinforcement of
the language, as for example a listening task. Taking into account the second point, I
believe that we should help students who speak very quietly to overcome this problem
and no foster their shyness by becoming their translators. Poor pronunciation can be
overcome by many other ways and not just by echoing. Besides, the teacher can be the
model but it does not mean that the only pronunciation learners should acquire is hers.
Finally, if there is an error the student can be asked about it and the teacher can elicit
and help him find the mistake. Echoing could be a strategy, but there are other ways that
can be more productive for the student.

 In my view echoing is an almost exclusively classroom-based discourse feature.

In real life we do not echo everything when having a conversation. We can show
surprise and echo an utterance with a different intonation, but certainly this is
not very common. However, there are some discourse features that exist inside
the classroom and not outside, and this does not mean that they are not
acceptable. Echoes might be dead ends and do not exist in real conversations,
nevertheless, they are used by us teachers without even noticing it.

REFLECTION

I have noticed that I used a lot of echoes in my lessons and I am really interesting in
monitoring this aspect of my own behaviuor. I am not in favour of echoes, so I
would like to start taking this aspect out of my lessons. I do not think that echoes
can be productive for my students. So, little by little I will try to use them as less as
possible. Anyway, using echoes or not using them do not make us worse or better
teachers, don’t you think?