Autonomous motivation plays a big role in language learning, which makes it a popular and vital direction to explore the measures of taking advantage of intrinsic motivation to achieve better teaching effects in educational research. This paper revolves around the relationship between motivation and self-determination theory regarding psychological needs. By exploiting the related empirical studies into learners studying English as a foreign language, this analytical paper analyses and compares the results of these empirical studies, which reveals that intrinsic motivation performs better than extrinsic motivation on these psychological levels. This paper concludes that intrinsic motivation can generally facilitate stronger autonomous learning, form higher competence, and improve greater relatedness. Therefore, educators should figure out ways to strategically tailor pedagogy to enhance intrinsic motivation and facilitate autonomous learning.

Ye Lisha. Impacts of the Motivations of English Learning on the Psychological Needs under Self-determination Theory. International Journal of New Developments in Education (2024), Vol. 6, Issue 7: 12-16. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJNDE.2024.060703.

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