Towards a better understanding of the L2 Learning Experience, the Cinderella of the L2 Motivational Self System

If you've spent time with the L2 Motivational Self System—the model that tries to explain why people stick with a second language, where L2 means second language—you probably know the two main components: the Ideal L2 Self you want to become, and the Ought-to L2 Self you feel others expect. However, there's a third element in this story that keeps stealing the spotlight without getting the recognition it deserves. It's called the L2 Learning Experience, often shortened to L2LE, and it basically refers to how the day-to-day process of learning actually feels. The classes, the tasks, the teacher, and the peers. This paper argues that this "Cinderella" deserves a real crown, and it offers a way to give her one: treat the L2 Learning Experience as engagement—what students actually do and feel in the moment—drawing from decades of work in educational psychology. Let's set the stage. Zoltán Dörnyei built the L2 Motivational Self System with those two future self-guides alongside a present-focused third component, the L2 Learning Experience. The first two are about who you could become: a fluent future self you're drawn to, or a version you think you should become. The third is about the present. How the lesson lands this week. How the group interacts today. Early on, Dörnyei acknowledged that the L2 Learning Experience captured situation-specific motives from the immediate learning environment, but he also admitted it existed on a different level from the self-guides and didn't have a clear theoretical foundation. So, it remained somewhat vague: important in practice, but fuzzy on paper. And yet, across studies, this fuzzy concept kept outperforming the stars. In a large Chinese dataset, You and Dörnyei reported that the measure most closely linked to the learning process—labeled Attitudes to L2 Learning in that study—had the strongest correlation with intended effort, about zero point sixty-seven, with the Ideal L2 Self trailing at zero point fifty-one and the Ought-to at zero point thirty-eight. Even when researchers divided the sample into subsamples—secondary students, university English majors, and non-majors—the same pattern emerged: the present experience predicted effort more strongly than the future image. Now, the label varied. Sometimes it read Attitudes to Learning English, and sometimes English Learning Experience. But the items sounded a lot like what we’d call engagement with learning. The main takeaway remained consistent: what happens in the classroom today is a powerful driver of tomorrow's persistence. This wasn't a one-off occurrence. A large body of work by Csizér and Dörnyei, and later Csizér, Dörnyei, and Németh, surveyed more than ten thousand learners and helped establish the whole L2 Motivational Self System. Parallel projects in other contexts—conducted by Kormos and Csizér, Papi, Papi and Teimouri, Islam with Lamb and Chambers, Lamb on his own, and Taguchi with Magid and Papi—continued to find the same thing. The L2 Learning Experience, regardless of how it was labeled, typically emerged as a strong predictor of key outcomes like intended learning effort and indicators of achievement, and in many cases, it was the strongest predictor. That's significant. Because if the present surpasses the future guides in explaining effort, we need a clearer view of what "present" actually means. Here's where the reframing comes in. Educational psychology has a well-established notion called student engagement. It's about active participation in school tasks and contexts. Think of behavioral engagement—showing up, speaking up, doing the work—as the visible tip of the motivational iceberg. There are also cognitive, affective, and social dimensions: how you think through problems, how you feel in class, and how you interact with peers. Skinner, Furrer, Marchand, and Kindermann made a clear distinction years ago: motivation is the potential, while engagement is its enactment. You can want to learn Spanish; engagement is raising your hand in Spanish, doing the project, and persisting when it gets challenging. That's concrete. That's measurable. And that's exactly the kind of clarity the L2 Learning Experience has been lacking. So, the proposal is simple but powerful: define the L2 Learning Experience as the perceived quality of learners' engagement with the language learning process. Notice the emphasis on "perceived." We're not only interested in how many times a student speaks; we're also asking how they experience that participation. Do the tasks feel meaningful? Do they feel a sense of belonging in that room? This shift anchors the L2 Learning Experience in a domain with practical tools. The Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, edited by Christenson, Reschly, and Wylie, outlines measurement issues and instruments across chapters. Fredricks and McColskey map multi-dimensional self-reports. Appleton and colleagues present school-based engagement scales. Even the Gallup polling group has an eight-item survey that captures daily engagement. None of these are language-specific out of the box, but they translate well if you focus on the aspects that matter in language classrooms. What are those aspects? Start broadly with the school context: a sense of belonging, shared norms, and general academic confidence. Learners who feel they're part of the community are more likely to take risks with a new tense in front of peers. Narrow down to the syllabus and materials: do the texts provoke curiosity, align with students' needs, and allow for ownership? When a reading or video reflects a student's interests, they engage more. Zoom in further to tasks: are they task-based or project-based? Are there clear goals and opportunities for progress checks? Well-designed activities promote engagement by making effort feel consequential. Consider peers: group dynamics, social acceptance, and norms of cooperation. A supportive group can encourage silent learners to become more talkative. And, of course, the teacher: rapport, leadership, clarity, and conflict resolution. A teacher who creates safety and challenge in the same lesson can turn effort into a habit. These are not abstract concepts. They're the elements of "experience" that students notice and that we can evaluate. If you've ever struggled with the variety of measures—Attitudes toward L2 Learning here, English Learning Experience there—this framing serves an additional purpose. It aligns labels with constructs. The reason those attitude-type measures consistently outperformed the future self-guides is that they were assessing engagement quality under different names. Dörnyei long argued that the system needed to create a harmonization based on experience, tying all three components back to concrete encounters. The engagement perspective provides that. It maintains the future orientation of the Ideal and Ought-to selves while giving the present a coherent structure. Measurement, importantly, becomes easier and more defensible. Instead of creating a new L2LE scale from scratch for every study, researchers can adapt validated engagement instruments to the language learning context. You might sample items across the five aspects we just discussed, combine behavioral and affective indicators, and track them over a semester. Self-reporting isn't the only option—observations and learning analytics can complement it—but even brief, well-crafted measurements can capture shifts in engagement quality. In the Chinese study by You, Dörnyei, and colleagues, the strong correlation of zero point sixty-seven with intended effort indicates that students' evaluations of their learning process closely align with what they plan to do. If you link those evaluations to engagement constructs, you've established a connection from theory to classroom practice. One concern deserves consideration. Does elevating engagement overshadow the future selves that originally inspired the L2 Motivational Self System? Not at all. It clarifies their relationship. The Ideal L2 Self provides direction and meaning; the Ought-to offers social pressure. The L2 Learning Experience, reframed as engagement quality, is where that pressure meets reality. Over time, repeated high-quality engagement can even shape the contours of the ideal self. Lamb's fieldwork and Papi's modeling both highlight these feedback loops in different ways: what you do today influences who you think you can become, and that belief shapes your actions tomorrow. There’s also a historical logic to this shift. The third component entered the model for practical reasons—to capture the impact of teacher behavior, curriculum, and group dynamics on motivation. Because it lacked a solid theoretical foundation, it became entwined with classroom climate and merged into attitude-like measures. The engagement framework clarifies this. It specifies what "experience" means, provides us with means to influence it, and explains why it was so predictive in the first place. Behavioral participation is the pathway from wanting to doing. When participation is supported by meaningful tasks, encouraging peers, and skilled teaching, effort accumulates into learning. What does this mean for those designing studies or classrooms? For researchers, it's an invitation to measurement. Use the engagement literature to create solid L2LE indices. Sample across context, materials, tasks, peers, and teachers. Focus on the behavioral core but don't overlook the cognitive and affective aspects. For teachers and program designers, it's a guide for design. Create tasks that resonate with students. Make progress visible. Foster norms where mistakes are viewed as data, not failures. Strengthen the connection between what students do this week and the selves they're growing toward. For the field as a whole, it’s an opportunity to reduce the confusion that arises from mixing future-oriented self-guides with a vaguely defined present. A common engagement language allows the three aspects of the model to stand on solid ground. If there's one number to remember, it's that zero point sixty-seven from the Chinese study—stronger than the Ideal L2 Self's zero point fifty-one and stronger than the Ought-to's zero point thirty-eight. It's a reminder that the daily grind is not merely noise surrounding the signal of distant goals. It is the signal. As Csizér and Dörnyei demonstrated across large samples, and as subsequent work by Kormos, Lamb, Papi, and others has reinforced, the present experience is where motivational energy is generated and spent. So, yes, Cinderella was overlooked. But the glass slipper here is not a new label; it's a clear framework. Define the L2 Learning Experience as engagement quality. Measure it with existing tools. Map it to the aspects teachers can influence. And keep the future selves in view as the horizon that engagement helps you move toward, one task, one interaction, and one effective lesson at a time.