An Investigation Into The Relationship Between Non-English Majors' EFL Motivations And Their Autonomy In English Learning

Since Holec imported the concept "Learner autonomy" (LA) to the foreign language education in the 1980's, researchers home and abroad have conducted lots of studies of LA. But the main foci of these studies lie in (1) the definition of LA; (2) analysis of the theoretical basis of LA and (3) ways to foster learners' LA. There are few studies of the relationship between motivation and LA. The perspectives of these studies narrow down to one issue: which comes first between them? Up till now, there have been no special quantitative studies of the relationship between motivation and LA.Taking EFL motivation1 as one influential variable on LA, this present study tries to probe into the relationship between EFL motivations and LA by conducting the Investigation into Non-English Majors' EFL Motivations and their Autonomy in English Learning with the adoption of quantitative and qualitative approaches. This study involved 471 second-year non-English majors from Shenyang Institute of Aeronautical Engineering (SIAE) and Southwest Petroleum Institute (SWPI).The following two questions are addressed in this study:1. Are there any correlations between non-English majors' EFL motivations and their AEL~2?2. If yes,1) How much and to what extent motivation correlates with AEL in general? Why?2) How much and to what extent the sub-motivations correlate with AEL respectively? Why?With the aid of SPSS 11.5 (Statistic Package for Social Science 11.5) on data processing, Pearson correlation analysis was performed and the five main findings were addressed. Firstly, there is a positive correlation at the significant level (.000)between motivation and AEL in general (r=.395**3). Secondly, there is no significant correlation (because the significance.263 is above .05) between motivation of learning situation and AEL with r=.O54. Thirdly, there exists a positive correlation at the significant level (.000) between (A) instrumental motivation and AEL and (B) cultural motivation and AEL with r=.394** and r=.414** respectively. Fourthly, there are positive correlations between AEL and (A) motivation of intrinsic interest (r=.513**); (B) motivation of social responsibility (r=.239**); (C) motivation of going abroad (r=.187**); (D) motivation of individual development (r=.264**); (E) motivation of immediate achievement (r=.400**) and (F) motivation of information medium (r=.288**) respectively. Finally, compared with motivation of learning situation and instrumental motivation, cultural motivation holds much higher correlation with AEL (r=.414**). Motivation of intrinsic interests, among all the sub-motivations, correlates with AEL (r=.513**) much more closely.Quantitative analysis (analyzing questionnaire results) and qualitative analysis (analyzing interview results) were conducted to interpret the correlations between motivations and AEL. And then, it suggests that AEL can be promoted by means of triggering their motivation of intrinsic interests, facilitating the transfer from instrumental motivation to the motivation of intrinsic interest and creating the supportive environment to cultivate students' motivation of learning situation. In the end, the limitations of this present study are summarized and the recommendations for the future studies on the similar topic are proposed.