Who You Want to Be Drives Language Learning: Moroccan Study Finds the Ideal Self Reigns

What actually pushes a student to master a foreign language? For decades, researchers assumed the answer lay in a blend of attitudes toward the language’s speakers, desire to integrate into a new culture, and pressure from parents, employers, or exams. A new study from Morocco now offers a strikingly clear answer: the single strongest driver of foreign language motivation among Moroccan undergraduates is not external obligation but the image students hold of their future selves as successful speakers of English or French. The finding, published in SN Social Sciences, comes from a team at Chouaib Doukkali University in El Jadida and offers fresh empirical support for one of the most influential theories in modern second language acquisition research.

The research, led by Jihane Es-sarrad together with Bouchaib Benzehaf and Hassane Razkane, set out to test the L2 Motivational Self System, a framework proposed by Hungarian linguist Zoltán Dörnyei in 2005 and refined in 2009. The theory marked a decisive shift away from the older social-psychological model of Gardner and Lambert, which had dominated the field since 1959 and centered on the idea of integrativeness, the wish to identify with another language community. Dörnyei instead drew on contemporary psychology of the self, particularly E. Tory Higgins’s 1987 self-discrepancy theory, which holds that people are motivated to reduce the gap between who they currently are and who they feel they should or could become. Applied to language learning, this means motivation flows from three distinct sources: the Ideal L2 Self, the vivid picture a learner has of themselves as a fluent future speaker; the Ought-to L2 Self, the attributes a learner believes they must possess to meet duties and expectations imposed by others; and the L2 Learning Experience, the day-to-day emotional texture of the classroom, the teacher, the curriculum, and peer interactions.

Morocco provides an unusually rich setting for testing this framework. The country is deeply multilingual, with Arabic and Amazigh as official languages and a long, complicated history with French, a legacy of the colonial period that remains embedded in administration, higher education, science, and business. English, meanwhile, has been rising rapidly in prestige, particularly among young people who associate it with global connectivity, technology, and international opportunity. Previous studies of Moroccan students’ attitudes have documented this shifting landscape, noting that high school students increasingly view English favorably relative to French. Yet few studies had directly compared the motivational profiles of learners of the two languages within the same theoretical framework, and fewer still had done so with university students using rigorous statistical comparisons. The new study was designed to fill precisely that gap.

The researchers recruited 207 undergraduate students learning English or French as foreign languages. Each participant completed two questionnaires built on five-point Likert scales, one measuring the components of the L2 Motivational Self System for English and the other for French. The instruments probed the three core constructs: how vividly students imagined their ideal future selves speaking the language, how strongly they felt obligated to learn it to satisfy external expectations, and how positively they experienced the actual learning environment. The study received ethical approval from Chouaib Doukkali University and was conducted in accordance with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants and anonymity maintained throughout.

The analytical strategy combined descriptive statistics with inferential techniques chosen to match the study’s questions. To identify which component of the motivational self system carried the greatest weight, the team used repeated measures analysis of variance, or repeated measures ANOVA, a technique suited to comparing multiple related means measured from the same individuals. To test whether motivation differed between learners of English and learners of French, they employed independent samples t-tests for pairwise comparisons and a one-way multivariate analysis of variance, MANOVA, which can detect group differences across several dependent variables simultaneously while controlling the overall risk of false positives. Effect size considerations followed the conventions established in Cohen’s classic 1988 treatment of statistical power, and the research design itself was grounded in established descriptive and survey methodology for the behavioral sciences.

The results were unambiguous. Across both language groups, the Ideal L2 Self emerged as the strongest motivational factor, meaning that students were driven above all by their vision of a future self who speaks the language successfully. The L2 Learning Experience ranked second, confirming that the concrete, lived experience of classes, teachers, and peer dynamics still exerts substantial influence on how motivated learners feel. The Ought-to L2 Self, by contrast, turned out to be the weakest of the three components. In other words, duty and obligation, the sense that one must learn a language to please parents, meet institutional requirements, or satisfy societal expectations, were the least energizing forces in these students’ motivational lives. For a country where French has historically been framed in terms of academic and professional necessity, the weak showing of the ought-to self is a notable signal about how younger generations relate to language learning.

Equally striking was what the comparisons between the two language groups did not find. Neither the independent samples t-tests nor the one-way MANOVA revealed significant differences between the motivators of English learners and those of French learners. The same hierarchy, ideal self first, learning experience second, ought-to self last, held for both languages. This suggests that the psychological architecture of language learning motivation may be more universal within this population than the sociolinguistic differences between the two languages might imply. Even though English and French carry very different historical, political, and symbolic weight in Morocco, the students’ motivational engines appear to run on the same fuel: a personal vision of a multilingual future self, sustained or undermined by the quality of their classroom experience.

The findings align with a growing international literature. Studies of Japanese, Chinese, and Iranian learners of English conducted in the wake of Dörnyei’s framework have repeatedly highlighted the centrality of the ideal self, and research on learners of additional languages, from German in Iran to Catalan in Spain to East Asian languages in Thailand, has shown how multilingual learners construct multiple future self-images that shape their effort. Some studies, however, have found the learning experience to dominate, as in research on Taiwanese learners of eight additional languages, and critiques of the framework in French-learning contexts have questioned its applicability outside English. The Moroccan results therefore add an important data point from a Francophone postcolonial context, suggesting that even where the target language is not English, the vision of an ideal self can remain the dominant motivational force.

The practical implications are direct. The authors recommend that teachers actively guide and promote students’ ideal selves, helping learners build vivid, plausible images of who they could become through the language, and that they cultivate a positive classroom atmosphere that encourages interaction between students. This dual recommendation maps neatly onto the two strongest factors the study identified: vision and experience. Concretely, it implies that motivational teaching is less about invoking external pressure, grades, requirements, warnings about employability, and more about helping students see their future bilingual or multilingual selves clearly and about making the daily experience of learning enjoyable, social, and rewarding. Techniques drawn from Dörnyei’s own work on motivational strategies, such as imagery exercises, success-oriented goal setting, and confidence-building interaction, become central rather than peripheral.

The study also carries broader significance for language policy in multilingual societies. As Morocco continues to debate the balance between French and English in higher education and science, this research suggests that policy discussions focused narrowly on instrumental necessity may be aiming at the weakest lever available. If students’ motivation is anchored primarily in their ideal selves, then educational systems that help students construct and pursue those selves, in whichever language, are likely to be more effective than systems that rely on obligation. With 207 participants, validated questionnaire instruments, and a statistical design that directly compared the two language groups, the study offers a methodologically solid snapshot of how a new generation of Moroccan students thinks about English, French, and their own futures. It is a portrait of motivation built not on duty, but on dreams.

Subject of Research: Second language learning motivation among Moroccan undergraduates within the L2 Motivational Self System framework

Article Title: Exploring the L2 Motivational Self System: a study of moroccan undergraduate students’ motivation to learn English and French

Article References: Es-sarrad, J., Benzehaf, B., & Razkane, H. (2026). Exploring the L2 Motivational Self System: a study of moroccan undergraduate students’ motivation to learn English and French. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01714-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01714-z

Keywords: L2 Motivational Self System, language learning motivation, Ideal L2 Self, Ought-to L2 Self, L2 Learning Experience, Morocco, English as a foreign language, French as a foreign language, undergraduate students, Dörnyei, multilingualism, repeated measures ANOVA