Correlation Between English Majors’ Listening Motivation And Listening Autonomy

With the increasing awareness of learner autonomy development, abundant researches have been carried out on factors affecting it, among which motivation is perceived as one of the most important and influential in SLA/EFL. Most of the researches focus on the precedence of either learner autonomy or motivation and only a few concerns their correlation. However, a large proportion of these correlation researches between English learner autonomy and motivation are about general domain while there are few studies concerning the specific domain, let alone the correlation between listening autonomy and listening motivation.With the employment of quantitative method, the present study mainly aims to investigate the relationship between listening autonomy and listening motivation by analyzing their correlation and making a comparison between high-level and low-level listening motivation groups.121first-year English majors completed both the questionnaires of listening autonomy and listening motivation on five-point Likert scale and SPSS18.0is employed to process and analyze all the valid data.1) Descriptive statistics show that college English majors’listening autonomy is at a medium level Except for knowing teaching goals and requirements well, their autonomous listening competence in the rest three aspects are almost at the same lower level. The mean score of the overall listening motivation is a little higher but is still at a medium level. The strongest listening motivation is valence motivation while motivation of learning situation is the lowest.2) Independent sample T-test shows that the results display a wide range of extremely significant differences both in the overall situation and the four categories of listening autonomy, especially in setting goals and making plans, monitoring of listening strategy use and monitoring of listening process. Although there’s significant difference of listening autonomy in knowing teaching goals and requirements, it’s weaker compared with the former three categories.3) Pearson correlation test explicitly indicates the close relationship between listening autonomy and listening motivation. For the influence on listening autonomy from each subcategory, SGMP (setting goals and making plans) has a greater prominence of influence on listening motivation. What go next are MLLP i.e. monitoring of listening learning process, MSLU i.e. monitoring of listening strategy use and UTGR understanding teaching goals and requirements.4) The results from the research also denote there is no obvious difference in the relationship between learner motivation and learner autonomy both in general and specific domain although the dominant listening motivations and the degree of listening autonomy may vary.At last, some implications and limitations of the study have been made for further teaching and research.