The Effect of Foregrounding and Backgrounding on Grammatical Complexity and Lexical Diversity of Oral Production of EFL Learners in a Foreign Language Learning Context

This paper examined an influence of two different narrative tasks on the grammatical complexity and lexical diversity of an oral performance of secondlanguage (L2) learners. The participants (N=90) were presented with two tasks with six pictures in each. One of the tasks contained both foregrounding and backgrounding events on it, but the second one had only the backgrounding event. Backgrounding events language refer to the main theme of the story, and foregrounding events refer to the supportive materials that elaborate on the side events taking place in the task. The complexity and diversity of the language in the oral production of the two comparable groups who were presented to foregrounding and backgrounding events were examined in a between subject design. The results showed that L2 performance was affected by the type of the task. Syntactic complexity and lexical diversity were increased by the participants who were given the task with both of the events on them. We reason that the task with backgrounding event on it leads participants into attempting more to talk about the events happening in the background, hence producing more complex and at the same time more diverse.