The aim of the study is to investigate a possible relationship between the extramural activity of gaming and scores of syntactic complexity for Swedish learners’ English written production taking the English 5 course. Additionally, the study investigates differences in scores of syntactic complexity between male and female students, as well as students enrolled in academic programs and vocational programs. 

The data is annotated from the Swedish Learner English Corpus (SLEC) and consists of 104 argumentative texts written by Swedish learners of English in the  English 5 course in upper secondary school. The 104 texts are randomly selected based on variables such as gender, program type, gaming frequency, Swedish as their L1, Swedish as the sole primary language used at home, English course, and year. This study only selected texts written by students in their first year of upper secondary school. 

The results of the study indicate no statistical difference either between students who are gamers and non-gamers; nor between male and female students or students enrolled in academic programs and students enrolled in vocational programs.  Further, no correlation was established between the frequency of gaming and scores of the chosen measures of syntactic complexity. Because no results indicate either statistical difference or strong correlation, the study also investigated if other extramural activities included in SLEC were found to correlate with scores of syntactic complexity. The additional analyses of the frequency of the extramural activities of reading, conversation, watching, and social media were not found to correlate with scores of syntactic complexity.