Electronic games in the English language: quantitative aspects of the lexical content

This paper has a Corpus Linguistics approach, referring basically to Berber Sardinha (2004), Nation (2003) and Cobb (1997). This paper general goal is to analyze the frequency of the lexical content in electronic games (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Need for Speed Pro Street and Neverwinter Nights I) in the English language. The games’ lexical content was converted into non-formatted text format so as to make data readable by the linguistic analysis tools. Since the research has a quantitative feature, all the linguistic and statistical treatment was performed by WordSmith Tools, version 5 and also VocabProfile, version 3. The computational analysis findings show that nearly 80% of the vocabulary contained in the three games belong to the most frequent English word lists. Therefore, the use of electronic games may be beneficial to students when it comes to vocabulary practice.