| Motivation is one of the most important aspects of learners' psychological factors and individual differences in learning a foreign language. It has significant influence on the whole process and outcome of the foreign language learning. Much research has been done on the subject of motivation in second/foreign language acquisition in the West. But English language learning motivation research started rather late in China. Since the beginning of the 21st century, motivation research has gained increasing attention among many Chinese researchers. More and more researchers have started to broaden their view and borrow new Western motivational theories to investigate EFL motivation in Chinese context.Since nearly no empirical research on the correlation between intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and English language proficiency has been done in the Chinese context, the research of this master's degree dissertation is to prove empirically which of the two kinds of motivation — intrinsic or extrinsic motivation contributes more to learners' English language proficiency, especially and particularly in the Chinese context.Therefore, this study is undertaken for several purposes:Firstly, to raise Chinese language researchers' and teachers' awareness of foreign language learning motivation;Secondly, to study the correlation between non-English majors' motivation types (intrinsic/extrinsic motivation) and their English language proficiency;Finally, to provide useful suggestions on how to enhance non-English majors' intrinsic motivation based on the findings of the study.In order to fulfill the research purposes, the author has conducted a survey among 146 subjects (non-English majors from Wuhan University) to investigate their motivation types (intrinsic/extrinsic motivation) on English learning. Resultsof the survey have proved the research hypothesis that there is higher correlation between intrinsic motivation and high English language proficiency for non-English majors in the Chinese context.
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