The Multimodal Affordances of Commercial-off-the-Shelf Video Games That Support Vocabulary Learning

Engagement with video games by second-language (L2) users has been shown to be a substantial source of English-language exposure linked to increased L2 vocabulary proficiency (Lindgren & Munoz, 2013). Word learning through gaming has been attributed to the affordances of video games (Kuppins, 2010), although few studies have investigated how digital games present vocabulary learning opportunities. This research expands on the work carried out by Rodgers (2018), which applied the principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2021) to television, by applying a multimodal analysis to 10 commercial games to examine how spoken dialogue is supported through visual, textual, and procedural modes. This was done by conducting a corpus analysis of gameplay recordings to classify the multimodal affordances for vocabulary. Results indicate that the imagery in digital games occurs similarly to narrative television and is further benefitted by additional modalities, demonstrating that video gaming could be a suitable medium for extramural learning