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The Treatment of Foreground-Background Information in the On-Line Descriptive Discourse of Second Language Learners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Russell S. Tomlin
Russell S. Tomlin
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Abstract

This paper compares the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of ESL. Fifteen native speakers and thirty-five advanced learners produced on-line (play-by-play) descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. A methodology for the quantitative analysis of discourse production is described which permits the explicit identification of foreground-background information and its interaction with both native speaker and interlanguage syntaxes. Results show that: (1) Native speakers and learners exhibit one universal discourse strategy in retreating to a more pragmatic mode of communication under the severe communicative stress of on-line description, as revealed through the systematic loss of the coding relations ordinarily holding between foreground-background information and clause independence/tense-aspect; (2) Learners also exhibit a learner-specific general communication strategy in which significant events are described but nonsignificant events avoided.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 115 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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