A Correlational Study Of Learning Motivation And Learner Autonomy

Learning motivation is one of the most important factors that affect language learners.Some of the motivations are converted into learner’s behavior, which are either autonomous orpassive, but some may fade away, so learning motivation must have inner correlation withlearner autonomy. Learner autonomy, however, is helpful not only for individual growing, butalso for social development and education innovation, which is also the hot spot of manycollege English teacher’s research work.This thesis mainly investigates the correlation between learning motivation and learnerautonomy. Some motivations, which promote the generation and stabilization of learners’autonomous behavior, are involved in this thesis. Therefore, the fruit of this research can beused as the theoretical basis for English teachers when fostering learner autonomy in education.Directed by self-determination theory, cognitive theory and constructivist learning theory,the current research study the inner correlation in the form of questionnaire and observation,regarding second-year students (non-English major) in Zhejiang Industry Poly-technicalCollege as the participants.A hypothesis was put forward in this research. That is, autonomous learning behavior canbe confirmed by the way of observation and questionnaire. Some students serving as theassistants of this research were selected in the classes. These students were chosen as theparticipants of the research. All assistants had been trained before they carried out theinvestigation. The following items are necessary for autonomous learners.1. Do they have definite goal?2. Do they have learning plan and control the course of learning?3. Do they have learning skills and ways?4. Do they choose learning material, time and place consciously on their own?76out of all observed students were invited to complete a questionnaire after they hadbeen sorted out from all participants. Out of over500students,48qualified students werefinally selected as the autonomous learners to participate the second round investigation. Thesecond round aimed at the inner correlation between learner autonomy and learning motivation,studied how they agreed to all items of motivations. The result from the investigation shows that motivations function in triggering autonomouslearning behavior, but there are significant differences among all motivations. Motivation ofindividual development plays most important role in generating and supporting the learnerautonomy. The research indicates that there is an order of all motivations according to theimportance in influencing the learner autonomy.This thesis has only scratched the surface of the problem of learner autonomy. I hope itwould lead to further in-depth investigations in this field.