Does Binary Classification of Motivation Carry Weight (Note 1)

With the population of postgraduates increasing in China, their academic study has attracted the attention of second language acquisition researchers. But the research into postgraduates’ motivation and autonomy is unfortunately scarce. This study explores the relationship between learning motivation and learner autonomy among English-major postgraduates based on the questionnaire administered to 117 participants. In view of the complicatedness of the postgraduates’ academic study, both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivations were further divided into two types. The results show that: 1) four types of motivation differ significantly and the strongest is motivation for job; 2) although each type of motivation positively correlates with the perceived autonomy, yet only type of intrinsic motivation and one type of extrinsic motivation has predictive power for the perceived autonomy. It indicates that binary classification of motivation does not work well in predicting the postgraduates’ perceived autonomy.