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' second language (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 Self-System (Dörnyei, 2005). Models of motivated behavior varied across the three investigated learner groups. For the secondary school pupils, it was 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.