Mining for Words: The effect of Minecraft on incidental vocabulary learning of young EFL learners

The fundamental component of language learning is the lexicon. Among various ways employed to facilitate vocabulary development, playing video games can highly contribute to developing vocabulary incidentally. This study examines how playing digital games impacts EFL learners’ incidental vocabulary acquisition. It also investigates gender in digital equity using a digital game, i.e., Minecraft. A total of 73 male and female Iranian pupils between the ages of 9 and 14 were recruited to examine whether incidental vocabulary acquisition through gameplay was effective and to determine whether gender could affect the results. As such, the two-way ANCOVA was run through SPSS to analyze the data. The results indicated that the gamers performed far better than the memorization group. However, no interaction effect between gender and the dependent variable was observed. The implications of the findings can benefit educators and young learners to choose appropriate digital games as supplementary tools for L2 lexical acquisition. The findings contribute to the increasing research on digital games’ potential as an effective tool for promoting vocabulary development.