World of VocCraft: Computer Games and Swedish Learners’ L2 English Vocabulary

Abstract

Learning languages is a social activity — and so is playing computer games. Many parents would probably object to the latter part of the statement, having experiences of their teenager not joining the rest of the family for dinner due to a quest, a dungeon, or a raid in World of Warcraft . But while being kept from family by a computer game may seem asocial, a teenager immersed in World of Warcraft is in fact meeting with people ‘of all ages, countries, and value systems’ (Gee, 2007b, p. 182) in an international virtual world. In this chapter, our aim is to show that playing computer games indeed facilitates second language (L2) acquisition. 1 In order to do so, we present three studies, each of which shows mounting evidence for the positive role of extramural English in general, and computer games in particular, in the acquisition of English vocabulary by Swedish learners. We will show how gender, age, and the type of gaming affect acquisition, and we discuss implications of these for teaching practice. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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