A study examined the use of background information by native and non-native English-speaking university students in explaining, summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and copying information from a reading text. Thirty students in composition courses (10 native speakers and 20 non-native speakers, 10 each from a remedial and a standard class) wrote papers on the same topic using the same background reading text. Information from the source text used in the student papers was categorized as to type (explanations, summaries, paraphrases, quotations, and copied information), function (background, foreground), and section of paper (first paragraph, final paragraph, intervening body paragraphs). Results indicated that students made significantly more use of information in the final paragraphs than in the body paragraphs. In their opening paragraphs, non-native speakers also used significantly more information from the source text than native speakers. In some cases, the student excerpt matched the background text except for slight changes in syntax or lexicon, but insufficient to constitute paraphrase, and more of these "near copies" and explanations of the background text functioned as foreground rather than background. The native speakers received higher mean holistic scores of writing quality than the non-native speakers due to more consistent academic style and tone in their written language. (Author/MSE)