Our study describes the motivation for learning English as a foreign language in three
distinct learner populations: secondary school pupils, university students and adult language
learners. Questionnaire data were collected from 623 Hungarian students. The main factors
affecting students’ L2 motivation were language learning attitudes and the Ideal L2 self, which
provides empirical support for the main construct of the theory of the L2 Motivational SelfSystem
(Dörnyei, 2005). Models of motivated behavior varied across the three investigated
learner groups. For the secondary school pupils, it was rather interest in English-language
cultural products that affected their motivated behavior, whereas international posture as an
important predictive variable was only present in the two older age groups.