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EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ACTIVITIES AND INDIVIDUAL LEARNER DIFFERENCES life, too. Ihis increased importance ultimately leads both to a shift from a foreign language status of English to a second language status (Graddol 2006) and to English becoming a global lingua franca. As a conseguence, with the emergence of English as a global lingua franca around the millennium, a number of researchers (Coetzee-Van Rooy 2006, Dörnyei et al. 2006, Irie 2003, Lamb 2004, Ushioda 2006, Warden-Lin 2000, Yashima 2000) started to guestion Gardners original theory and claimed that it may be applicable to a specific context (e.g., Canada), but it cannot necessarily be universally transferred to other contexts. This is particularly true for the English language, which, as a global lingua franca, has no specific language community into which a learner could integrate. As a response to this, Dörnyei (2005) developed his L2 Motivational Self System, which draws on Markus and Nurius’ (1986) Possible Selves Theory and Higgins’ (1996) Self-discrepancy Theory. Dérnyei’s (2005) theory is centered on students’ learning behavior and how this behavior is affected by three dimensions, namely the Ideal L2 Self, the Ought-to L2 Self, and the L2 Learning Experience. The next sections, therefore, introduce the three dimensions of the theory. 2.3.1.1 The Ideal L2 Self Dörnyei (2005: 106) defines the Ideal L2 Self as “the L2-specific aspect of one’s ideal self”, which refers to the ideal future image of the learner about themselves. Papi (2010) points out that if someone wishes to be a competent and fluent L2 user who is able to hold a conversation with their friends in the particular L2, this person creates this image in themselves. This self-perceived image could serve as a strong motivator to achieve their goals, which is to “reduce the discrepancy between the here-and-now or actual self and this ideal image” (Papi 2010: 468-469), i.e., since the learner is not yet as competent a speaker as they wish to be, the desire to close that gap can drive their SLA motivation. With an EE example, if a video game player wants to converse with their international friends using the English language, and as they are not necessarily proficient enough to do this, they are more likely to be motivated to put more effort into learning English. The Ideal L2 Self is based on the Gardnerian (1985) concept of integrativeness, and even though empirical research conducted by Taguchi et al. (2009) and Ryan (2009) found that this dimension of the Motivational Self System may be interpreted as the integrativeness put forth by Gardner (1985); in the case of English, however, which has become a global lingua franca, there is no point talking about a specific language community. This is because there are several countries with native English speakers (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) and + 32 +
