Interplay Of Chief Motivational Factors Affecting EFL Motivation--An Empirical Study

English learning motivation is essential for English learning achievement. With a view to understanding EFL motivation fully and exactly, this thesis attempts to specify the interrelations of chief motivational variables affecting EFL motivation of Chinese college students, in the hope that the findings would yield fresh enlightenment for English teachers to generate, maintain, and enhance their students' motivation to learn the language so as to attain the ultimate goal of effectively improving the motivational level of Chinese college students on the whole.On the basis of a wide-ranging review of related literature, the researcher identified the following seven important motivational variables: Need for Achievement, Interest, Self-efficacy, Goal Setting, Learning Purpose, Valence as well as Causal Attribution, and formulated a set of hypotheses concerning their interrelations. The purpose of the present study was to find the actual interrelations and interaction effects of the main motivational variables to test these hypotheses. The subjects were 185 second-year non-English majors from three universities in Nanjing. The instruments in the survey study were CET-4 and a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire consisting of 70 items. Two statistical packages, SPSS and LISREL were employed for data analysis. First, reliability analysis and factor analysis were performed on the data by SPSS. Then LISREL was operated to test the hypothesized causal model of the major factors affecting EFL motivation.The following results were obtained: Need for Achievement influenced Motivational Behavior, Interest and Goal Setting; Interest had the strongest effect on Motivational Behavior, affecting it directly and indirectly through Self-efficacy; Self-efficacy influenced Motivational Behavior directly and indirectly through Valence and Goal Setting; Valence had an obvious effect on Motivational Behavior through Learning Purpose and Goal Setting; Learning Purpose affected Motivational Behavior and Goal Setting; Mastery Goal had a positive effect on MotivationalBehavior; Causal Attribution influenced most of the variables identified: Motivational Behavior, Interest, Self-efficacy, Valence, Long-term Purpose and Goal-setting; Motivational Behavior was the very factor through which motivation exerted its effect on language achievement. The findings reveal that the considerable contribution of students' EFL motivation to their language achievement is the result of the joint effects of all these motivational variables, rather than the effect of a single variable or these variables in isolation.