Holding Back English Learners: The Impact of Early Elementary Grade Retention on Language Development

Abstract

An abundance of scholarly work indicates that the practice of requiring a student to repeat a grade likely has significant academic, social and long-term effects on students. Grade retention, prevalent in elementary schools across the United States, is even more common for English learners, who make up more than 10% of students across the country, and who are already more likely to struggle in school. It is difficult to find literature to inform practitioners and scholars of the outcomes of EL students’ language development after grade retention. The present study seeks to examine whether grade retention affects EL students, and whether there may be detriments to language development.

The present study seeks to inform scholars and practitioners of the outcomes of retention for English learners by analyzing the language development over time for EL students seven years after retention, as compared with promoted EL peers of statistical similarity pre-retention. The sample included students who were current English learners in a district in the Midwest. Propensity score matching was utilized to create quasi-experimental comparison groups of retained, treatment, and matched-promoted students, control. Data were analyzed using a multilevel model to examine change between individuals and over time.

As expected, on the whole, students in both groups improved their English proficiency over time; however, when compared with matched-promoted peers, retained English learners achieved lower scale scores in all three assessed domains: Listening, Reading and Writing. The growth slopes did not significantly differ between retained and promoted groups for any domain.

Holding back English learners is not beneficial to language development; in contrast, retained students fared worse in the assessed domains (Listening, Reading and Writing).