Incidental foreign language vocabulary acquisition from social network games

It is widely known that young people use social networks not only for sharing and communication purposes but also as means of entertainment and pleasure by playing various online games. Furthermore, there is a common belief among pedagogues that spending valuable amount of time on social networks to play online games can lead to negative academic, personal and social outcomes. However, the findings of this study based on survey conducted with 248 high school students reveal that social network games can also have pedagogical benefits. The results of this research have shown that students can incidentally learn an important number of foreign language words from popular online games on social networks.