Female students have long had a perceived advantage over male students in second language ac-quisition. In Swedish schools, the girls have outperformed the boys in the subject of English since the end of the Second World War, but the female students’ edge over the male students has diminished considerably over time. This essay aims to find out if there are any differences in lin-guistic ability between the two genders. The study uses a T-unit based syntax analysis in order to quantify the level of syntactic maturity that Swedish high school students possess, using data drawn from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus. Furthermore, the study aims to research gen-der-based stylistic differences and risk-taking behavior in the student’s writing. The results show that there are differences in syntactic maturity between the genders, as the female students in junior high school and the male students in senior high school outperform their respective counterparts, particularly in the indices based on error-free T-units. In addition, there are also stylistic disparities, as the female students have a greater focus on personalized ac-counts in their writing and the male students in junior high school have a very sparse and concise style of writing. The conclusion is drawn that while there are differences in syntactic maturity between boys and girls, the syntactic indices cannot accurately display the sophistication of the students’ writing and consequently should only be used in conjunction with more qualitative measures. Finally, while the study is not able to discern risk-taking in the students’ writing, the author concludes that risk-taking is an important factor in second language acquisition, especially considering the fact that the Swedish curricula in junior and senior high school English have a strong focus on communicative competence.

This paper is a study of the noun phrase construction in L2 learner language and the base for the study are the tools for measuring syntactic maturity presented by Kellog W. Hunt (1966). Hunt and other scholars have used T-units, the smallest terminable unit in language, to analyze L2 learner language. This study however, analyzes the construction of the noun phrase instead of T-units. Although the focus differs there are many similarities between the method used in this study and in those analyzing T-units. This means that the study tries to create indexes which we can use as tools for measuring syntactic maturity and complexity among L2 learners, by measuring consolidation and postmodification. The outcome of the study shows that it is possible to measure consolidation of the noun phrase and that this figure may very well function as a tool for measuring language development. Furthermore this paper investigates opportunities for teachers to teach syntax and concludes that there are ways of improving L2 teaching by utilizing knowledge about L2 learner syntax.