This paper reports a replication of part of Tavakoli and Foster’s (2008) investigation into the influence of narrative task design on L2 oral performance. The initial study found in part that narratives with both foreground and background information elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than those with only foreground information. This close replication adds the variable of literacy, conducting the study with adult refugees to New Zealand with low L1 literacy. Participants narrated two of the four cartoon strips in Tavakoli and Foster (2008). In contrast to the initial study, background information in the narrative tasks had no impact on the syntactic complexity, lexical diversity or fluency of performances. However, given the tendency of participants to omit background events, this outcome is discussed in terms of visual literacy, and aptness to describe rather than connect the cartoon frames. The implications for the use of narrative tasks with such learners are explored.