OBSERVATION #2: Language echoes.

In this observation I observed a class in the 3rd year of primary school. After making myself familiar with the way "echoing" is defined, I decided to script some examples of echoing and the utterances leading up to them.
Before analysing the class I honestly thought I would get more situations with echoing but in fact, I could only find three. This is what I got from this lesson:

1) T: Today is...?
S: Teacher, today is Friday.
T: Today is Friday. (No change in intonation)

2) T: What does Norton have?
S: A sandwich.
T: A sandwich? (Yes-no question for confirmation)
S: Yes, a sandwich.

3) T: What's that in N° 7?
S: A biscuit.
T: A biscuit. (Again, no change in intonation)

After the class, re-reading the worksheet we were given and my papers, I started wondering whether echoing number 2 is really an example of echoing or not. Given that the teacher is asking for a yes-no question, I would say it isn't but I'm still not 100% sure.
In all of the three cases above, I believe that the teacher didn't realize that she was echoing her student. In fact, since I am the one observing it's easy for me to detect it but I think most of the teachers do it just unconsciously.

When the children were "echoed", there was no sign of response from them. In fact, after seeing they wouldn't respond or react in any way, I started to think what was the purpose of echoing as there was something missing or at least it felt that way.
The same happened when it comes to classroom interaction, I could notice that echoes didn't add anything at all either. Could it be that when teacher echoes them they feel she could be trying to correct them? If so, this could be a problem because children could fell scared to make mistakes and they would not participate again.
Honestly, I still have difficulties to find the purpose of echoing as I haven't seen any positive response in this observation. That's why I think that echoing can't be taken into account as a way of giving feedback. If you think about it, it doesn't really help students to detect a mistake nor to correct it. It seems as if it is just repeating what somebody said and repetition is one thing, feedback another thing. When a teacher gives feedback, the purpose is to help students to know if they are right or wrong and how to correct it, echoing is something different.
Then again, maybe this observation wasn't the best example for echoing. Somehow this experience makes me believe that echoing is exclusively classroom-based discourse feature because outside the classroom echoing is normally used when we show shock or surprise, if that's really echoing.

As Lindstromberg says echoing is a way to reinforce language, but it is certainly not the only way. The same happens with pronunciation, poor pronunciation may not necessarily be solved by echoing but through listening games, for example.
However, I do agree with him that echoing could be used as a strategy to correct students. Of course, never forgetting that there are other ways to correct an error.
Finally, I would like to say that since I still don't see how it could contribute to my class, I'm still not sure if I would apply it in one of my future classes.