The Effect of Foregrounding and Backgrounding Events 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 second-language (L2) learners. The participants (N=90) were presented with two tasks with six pictures in each. One of the tasks contains both foregrounding and backgrounding events on it, but the second one has only the backgrounding event. Foregrounding events refer to the main theme of the story, and Backgrounding events refer to the supportive materials that elaborates 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 show 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 language.

کلیدواژه ها:

task-based language teaching ، narrative task ، grammatical complexity ، lexical diversity ، foregrounding event ، backgrounding event