Episode 163 Raul Mora on Understanding Second Language Users as Gamers
Raul Mora on Understanding Second Language Users as Gamers
Episode Summary
In this episode of Experience Points, Dr. Raul Alberto Mora shares insights from his book Understanding Second Language Users as Gamers: Language as Victory. He explores how gamers learn English through play, not for school, but to win, connect, and belong in gaming spaces. Mora emphasizes the value of research by gamers, highlighting how his team of undergrad researchers brought unique perspectives shaped by thousands of hours of gameplay. He also discusses the importance of mentoring young scholars and making academic work accessible beyond universities: through podcasts, libraries, and platforms like TikTok. Games, Mora argues, aren’t just entertainment, they’re immersive spaces for language learning, identity-building, and academic innovation.
Raúl Alberto Mora
he/him/his
Professor
Literacies in Second Languages Project, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia)
Dr. Raúl Alberto Mora is an associate professor at the School of Education and Pedagogy at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín. He has served as a visiting professor, scholar, and guest lecturer at universities in Colombia, Poland, Mexico, Czechia, Brazil, the United States, Spain, and Norway. He is currently researching how people learn languages in cities and gaming communities, how to teach different types of literacy in language education, the importance of critical approaches to teaching English and multilingualism in developing countries, and how to use AI thoughtfully in language teaching, all of which he explores at the Literacies in Second Languages Project (LSLP) Research Lab, which he leads at UPB. Dr. Mora holds a B.A. in Modern Language Education from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, as well as an M.A. in Teacher Education and a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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[Dave Eng] (0:02 - 1:05)
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more at www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Dr. Raul Alberto Mora. Dr. Mora is an associate professor at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia. He leads the Literacies and Second Languages Project, where he explores how people learn language in cities, gaming spaces, and multilingual communities. Dr. Mora's work spans critical literacy, language education, and the thoughtful use of AI in teaching. He has recently co-published the book, Understanding Second Language Users as Gamers, Language as Victory. Dr. Mora, welcome to the show!
[Raul Mora] (1:06 - 1:10)
Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here to share what the work we did for this book.
[Dave Eng] (1:11 - 1:37)
Great. I'm glad that you're here. I'm glad to talk about the book. And I want to get into that with the very first question, which is Languages as Victory. So I know we had connected prior to this interview about your book and about your work in general, but for the benefit of all the listeners, can you give us a really broad overview of your book? And as you said in our discussions, the book was created, “by gamers, not just about gamers.” So what does that distinction mean for you in practice?
[Raul Mora] (1:38 - 5:48)
Okay. Yeah, that's great. So kind of to talk about the book, the book begins with two fundamental questions. So what's the relationship between gamers and second languages, in particular English? Do language learners gravitate to games or do gamers gravitate to languages? And once we established that usually gamers gravitate to second languages, there comes the second question, which is why do they gravitate to those languages?
And when I asked my team about the question, the first answer we had was, well, to win the game. And that to win the game created the entire language as victory framework, where we start looking at how gamers begin to interact with second languages, English and others that appear in games as a way to participate in the game, to play, to succeed in the game, to thrive, and also to be part of these extended communities, guilds and other spaces, social media. And as they navigate language, how that helps them make better sense of the entire gaming situation.
So how they use different vocabulary strategies, how they use semiotic markers within the games, how they engage with the game, and then how that even melds with that identity as gamers, as human beings, as teachers, as parents, et cetera. And the question about by gamers, not just about gamers, that came as the result of our extended review of the existing literature in the field. We noticed there were a lot of books and articles where they looked at what gamers did, and they observed the games, and then researchers looked at specific games.
But we didn't find any research where we had gamers directly involved in the research endeavor. And I can tell you that if I hadn't edited the book with the gamers in my team, in team at IV, involved from the outset, the book would be completely different. It would be an entirely different book, because bringing their input as gamers allows me to make decisions about what games to analyze.
So we can just go beyond the traditional. Let's look at League of Legends. Let's look at World of Warcraft.
Let's look at Minecraft. And they start saying, let's look at Genshin Impact. Let's look at Call of Duty.
Let's look at the entire Grand Theft Auto thing. And then we can say, let's go back in time and let's look at Pong and let's look at Atari as part of the analysis. So that experience of having the gamers directly involved in designing the project and then helping us think about the data and then writing the chapters where they're bringing together, where they're meshing the data we collected with their personal experiences, gives the book a very different perspective about what gaming looks like from that experience, from the life experience.
My researchers, they're still learning to do research. It's still very young in terms of the academic trajectory. But they bring to the table thousands of hours of gaming.
And those thousands of hours of gaming allow us to think about how to explore the gaming world from very different dimensions, from very different perspectives, from very different points of view that make the experience more inclusive, more comprehensive. In fact, it's even a learning experience for me as the mentor of this cadre of gamers.
[Dave Eng] (5:49 - 6:13)
And Raul, thanks for that response. I appreciate it. I just want to clarify also for the listeners. So when you talk about gamers and using second language, are you talking about the type of language that these players may use specifically like within the game? Like you listed a bunch of titles before and exclusively like digital games, video games. But are you talking about like how these gamers who are, say, playing Call of Duty interact with each other? Would you say that's the focus?
[Raul Mora] (6:14 - 7:24)
Yeah, so that's one of the focus, yes, it's how we interact with each other, but how it within the game, because in particular, let's talk about English for a second. English is still the primary game, the primary language, sorry, the primary language in which games happen. I mean, there are growing communities in Spanish, growing communities in Portuguese or German, but English still remains the chief language of the gaming trade.
So when they're in these spaces, they start realizing they need to hone in their language skills to interact with other players, but also to navigate the game itself. And if you think about today's games, there is a lot more language in those games when you think about how games have extended story modes and how there is all the dialogue that is involved in the games. You need that language in order to navigate those spaces, in order to survive the missions or to finish the quests or to go to the next level.
[Dave Eng] (7:25 - 8:07)
I see. Thank you. And I think that's a really important aspect because I've read a lot of studies on applied games and using games and educational frameworks and everything.
But I think that this one is really unique because it is ultimately a study about how these gamers use language, which brings me to my second question on academic inclusion. So, I mean, I asked you about this before, Raul, and you clarified a little bit, but I want to dive a little bit deeper here. So now you worked with a lot of young emerging scholars outside of traditional academic circles.
You know, specifically, why was that important for this project? I know, again, we connected before, but for the benefit of the audience, if you could tell us about these emerging scholars outside of academic circles and why you felt it was important that you include them as part of this study.
[Raul Mora] (8:08 - 11:11)
Oh, that's a beautiful question. Just to give the context, when we talk about the Literacies in Second Languages project, that is a research lab that is within my university, but it's a research lab that primarily works with undergraduate students. And the idea of these spaces is to introduce these undergraduates into the world of research, into learning to do research.
In our case, it's not just introducing them to the world of research, but also introducing them to how to improve their communicative competence in that second language that, in the case of our students, they're going to be teaching in the near future. So my researchers are in a pre-service English education program, and many of them will eventually go into teaching. Some end up going in other areas, but the majority of them will go into teaching.
And I think it's really important to promote these young emerging scholars because sometimes academic spaces may not be as welcoming as they should. Sometimes it's really difficult for some of these young scholars to gain entry to academia. There is a little thing, sometimes it's too much gatekeeping that would keep these young scholars in the space.
So one of the things I really want to give credit, it's not just to the team, but also to the series editors of the book is housed, that they took a flyer on the team, they took a flyer on me giving us the opportunity to do this because not every publisher and not every series editor would be so welcoming of saying, so we have a professor and a team of 13 undergrads and recent graduates from our program. Let's just hand them the keys to a book contract.
I mean, it can be for some editors a risky proposition. And for our team, it was risky because it was one of the biggest academic challenges we've ever had collectively. And we really wanted to do it very well in order to show other people in these academic spaces that it's worth giving opportunities to young scholars that if you create those spaces and you give them those opportunities, they are going to rise to the occasion.
I mean, in putting together the book, we had a lot of challenges where we had a lot of turnaround because of life, pandemic, graduation, what have you. And everybody who stayed in the project till the end, they rose to the occasion and they really did beautiful work in each of the chapters they co-authored.
[Dave Eng] (11:12 - 11:52)
Thank you, Raul. I think this is really important because, like you said before, a lot of researchers may be hesitant in order to bring different intellectuals and academics into the space, a lot of young researchers. You know, as one faculty member to another, what would you say to other researchers who are kind of hesitant about reaching out outside of traditional academic circles for other academics or researchers to join them in their study?
Would you ask them to be less hesitant about asking? What tips would you give other academics who may want to expand who they collaborate with to be more inclusive, kind of like with your study?
[Raul Mora] (11:53 - 14:55)
I would say, I mean, like the short answer is go for it. Now, the extended answer is go for it, being mindful that there is going to be, you're going to have to be willing to take on a heavy mentoring role. That there is going to be, you're going to have to do a lot of mentoring in the process because I'm thinking about my team.
They're very talented, young scholars, I mean, brilliant beyond belief, but they were still learning all these social conventions of academic writing. So I had to walk them through the process, not only the process of writing, but also the process of getting a message saying, by the way, you are the tank, aka the lead author of chapter seven, when two hours ago that student was not in charge of the chapter. And so it's also kind of how I'm going to walk them through the process, how I'm going to mentor them, how I'm going to help them realize that this is a task they can overcome, that they have the intellectual capacity to make it happen, and they have the life experience to make it possible.
So working with these populations, as opposed to working with other colleagues who may have more experience navigating academic writing or the process of publishing, yeah, it's going to take up a little more work and sometimes a lot more work, but it's going to be more rewarding because once you see the outcome and you see the possibilities of creating these spaces and creating these communities, because the other thing is, if you, for example, working on a project or working on a volume like this, it's not simply about saying you work on the chapters and then bring them to me and I put them together. No, there has to be a sense of team building, community building for this project to happen. This project is a project we have one team that even before I started thinking about the possibility of the book, I had to create the conditions for us to see ourselves as a community.
Once we saw ourselves as a community, we were able to start thinking we can start doing those conference presentations and for those conference presentations, maybe we can write an article and then we say, why not a book? But without building the community, without building those conditions where we feel comfortable working with each other, where we feel comfortable confiding in each other, it's really difficult to make that happen. So first you have to build the community, you have to get those conditions and then you can set yourself on the next academic challenges.
[Dave Eng] (14:56 - 16:21)
Right. Thank you, Raul. I know that mentorship aspect is something that could be off-putting for a lot of academics and researchers, but I know that for a lot of other faculty who are also researchers, that mentorship aspect is actually something that's very becoming and it's something that I've liked too, particularly mentoring other academics and researchers in the field and knowing that they're ultimately going to be the future of the field in general. But that kind of leads me into my third and last question here, which is now that I think about it and the questions and everything you've discussed so far, Raul, this has kind of been like a meta study. So it's not necessarily about games themselves, but it's about that second language that gamers create when they play and when they form this community with each other.
And then that aspect was also combined with the fact that you are approaching this research question, this field through non-traditional means, bringing in other people who are outside of traditional academic circles. And again, that leads into the third question, which is beyond the ivory tower. I think that academic literature and research is very important, but oftentimes, like you said before, it can be very difficult from an accessibility standpoint for people that are like lay people, there are people that are outside of the ivory tower, outside of the academy.
So my question for you is what advice would you give academics who want to bring their research into non-academic spaces using things like podcasts, like this podcast or Twitch or YouTube? What advice would you give them?
[Raul Mora] (16:22 - 21:07)
I would say the first piece of advice I provide is be yourself. And by being yourself means sometimes the way we talk in academic circles, and we have to talk like that because of some of the requirements, we can lean really heavily on certain vocabularies, certain jargon, certain concepts that in that particular space, they would work. But if I'm going to...
And I'll give you a very concrete example, actually kind of an anecdote. One of my researchers, we have sometime in the middle of February, I have a lecture at the University of Columbia in their doctoral program in ELT. And my student writes to me on Discord asking, Dr. B, can I invite my friends?
And I said, what do you mean by inviting your friends? So my family and everybody said, well, this would not be the place because this is going to be a very heavy, very heavy on the framework of the methodology because I'm talking to doctoral students and I'm talking to doctoral faculty. I told them, listen, we're going to be doing, we're planning to do some talks in local libraries in schools.
Maybe that's the place because the language is going to be a lot more accessible. I mean, I doubt that if I were to give a talk like this about the book in a library talking to the public, I don't think I would even use the word conceptual framework, just to say one word. No, I would talk about Languages as Victory and what it means, but I would not go into all the conceptual underpinnings of that.
No, I will talk about what it is, why it's important to think about it. So as we move to non-academic spaces, the first thing you have to let go is of this notion that you have to talk about all these little details that we talk about in the non-academic spaces and keep the Language more like yourself. Think about, there's one thing I used to really enjoy reading when I was on Twitter a long time ago.
For a while, there was a running thread that said, explain your research to a seven-year-old. And faculty members were writing their tweets about that. And I was like, how would I explain, and I would say, for example, how would I explain my research or what I did in this book to my parents who love to hear about my research, but I'm not going to go into this.
I'm going to tell them what's really important without adding all the more dense elements. I'll go to the heart of the matter, to what's really important and to what they want to hear. So when you move into the non-academic spaces, you have to let go of certain things that are the norm when we are in the academic spaces and start getting more into the heart of what you're doing.
So really, you asked at the very beginning, what is this book about? So this book is about, yeah, it's about how gamers play, but how in playing, they also play with language. I don't have to start going into the whole notion of what I mean by Language or what I mean by victory.
That is something that if I'm in an academic conference, I'm going to have to explain because that's what I want. If I'm talking in a public library or I'm talking in a high school, I want them to really get excited about the research I did. And I wanted to get excited about the research we did in the case of the LAV book.
So I would say, really be more, be yourself when you are in the non-academic spaces and how you talk in those non-academic spaces. And let go of those expectations of some of those constitutive elements of the academic discourse and really get to the heart of why you're doing the research you're doing and talk about that. And I think that might make our research more accessible, more appealing, more interesting to all kinds of audiences.
[Dave Eng] (21:08 - 22:18)
Thank you, Raul. Yeah, I think that's a really poignant way of putting it because like you said before, you always really have to think about the medium and the audience that you're speaking to. There's going to be times when you're going to be presenting to other academics, to other faculty members.
And then there's going to be times when you're presenting to people or talking and communicating with people who are not part of that background. And that's okay. And I think the whole purpose of this question was to better understand how to format that message for those different mediums.
So if you want to, but you're not limited to like podcasts, Twitch or YouTube, you're going to have to focus on things that are going to be audio focused, things that work well for a live medium or things that are visually appealing. And just knowing that the people that you're talking to, your audience, the ultimate people who are going to receive your communication are outside of that academic circle. And not to say to dumb it down, but to try to explain things in as simple a way as possible, I think is incredibly important.
So thank you, Raul, for sharing that. And I appreciate it. Unfortunately, though, we're at the end of our podcast time.
So I wanted to ask you, one, thank you for joining us today. And also, where can people go online to find out more about you, your work and the book?
[Raul Mora] (22:21 - 23:30)
Well, I would say one of the best places to find more about our work, and I would say our, because I want to really take this moment to bring up LSLP, the Literacy and Second Languages Project Lab, because that is the very reason all of this exists. It's because I've had students who believe in this and they have been committed to the cause. Probably the best way to learn about us is through our social media.
So you can follow us on Instagram and TikTok with the handle LSLP Legion. One word, LSLP Legion. So it's the same one for Instagram and TikTok.
And then you can see some of the things we've done. If you want to learn a little more about the book by looking at some of these, some snippets and summaries, we have video summaries on TikTok and we have a little snippets on Instagram. So I think probably that would be the best place.
And from there, you can probably also get to my individual work. But I think today I really want to highlight what LSLP is and what we do.
[Dave Eng] (23:30 - 23:39)
All right. Well, thank you, Arul. I appreciate that.
I'm also going to include those links in the references or show notes. So again, thank you for joining us today.
[Raul Mora] (23:40 - 23:41)
My pleasure.
[Dave Eng] (23:43 - 24:46)
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more than a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP.
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Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2026, May 3). Raul Mora on Understanding Second Language Users as Gamers. (No. 163) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/163
Internal Ref: UXPIHUORQ4U2
References
Literacies in Second Languages Project. (2025). A dream called LSLP. Retrieved February 9, 2026, from https://www.lslp.org/
Global Wordsmiths. (2025). Language access matters now more than ever. Retrieved February 9, 2026, from https://www.globalwordsmiths.com/single-post/language-access-matters-now-more-than-ever
Eng, D. (2021, October 26). Applied games-based learning. Retrieved February 9, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/10/26/applied-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2023, October 17). What is player engagement? Retrieved February 9, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2023/10/17/what-is-player-engagement