Why English Learners Lose Motivation and Quit

By The Dobi Apps Team · Published 2026-09-16 · Originally published at dobiapps.com

Self-determination theory research on autonomy, competence, and relatedness explains why English learners quit, and what keeps motivation going instead.

In short: Most English learners quit not from a lack of discipline but because three psychological needs go unmet: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Self-determination theory research on second-language learners ties each need directly to how much anxiety a learner feels, how fast interest turns to amotivation, and whether a learner intends to keep studying at all.

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Why Do Most English Learners Quit Before They Get Fluent?

Most English learners quit not from a lack of discipline but because three psychological needs go unmet while they study: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Self-determination theory research on second-language learners ties each of these needs directly to measurable outcomes, including how much anxiety a learner feels, how quickly interest curdles into indifference, and whether a learner intends to keep studying English at all.

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, argues that any activity, language learning included, stays motivating only as long as it satisfies these three needs. Applied to second-language acquisition by researchers including Kimberly Noels, the theory reframes quitting as a diagnosable event rather than a mysterious loss of willpower. A learner who feels they have no say in what they study, who cannot tell whether they are improving, or who has no one to share the language with is a learner whose motivation has a specific, identifiable hole in it.

This is a different question from how to build a daily study habit, which is covered separately in how to build an English learning habit that lasts. A habit is the mechanism that makes practice automatic once a learner wants to keep going. This article is about why the wanting disappears in the first place, and what the self-determination theory research on English and other second languages says restores it.

What Actually Causes English Learners to Lose Motivation?

Demotivation is not a single feeling but a process, and a 2022 review of 28 studies found it running through both internal and external causes acting together. Reduced confidence, fading interest, and language anxiety sit on the internal side; unhelpful teaching, tedious materials, and unsupportive people around the learner sit on the external side, and the two sets reinforce each other rather than acting alone (Gao & Liu, 2022).

Disappointment is the specific trigger the review keeps surfacing: a learner studies for a while, does not see the improvement they expected, and starts attributing that gap to factors outside their control. Self-determination theory has a name for the end state of that process: amotivation. Kimberly Noels and colleagues describe amotivation as the condition in which

“people have no reason, intrinsic or extrinsic, for performing the activity, and they would be expected to quit the activity as soon as possible.”

— Noels, Pelletier, Clément & Vallerand

That definition matters because it separates quitting from failing. A learner who quits English study has usually not run out of willpower; they have run out of a felt reason to continue, and self-determination theory ties that reason directly to whether autonomy, competence, and relatedness were present in how they were studying.

What Does Self-Determination Theory Say a Learner Actually Needs?

Self-determination theory names three needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and treats motivation as a direct function of how well each one is met, not as a fixed trait some learners have and others lack. Kimberly Noels and colleagues, studying why heritage-language, foreign-language, and English-as-a-second-language learners kept going, summarized the same finding across all three groups:

“Intrinsic and self-determined extrinsic motivation are maintained to the extent that learners feel that engagement in an activity is a personally meaningful choice, that the task can be performed competently, and that they share a social bond with significant others in the learning context.”

— Noels, Adrian-Taylor, Saumure & Katz

Autonomy, in this research, is not the absence of structure. It is a learner’s sense that studying English is something they chose, for reasons that are actually theirs, rather than something imposed from outside. Competence is a felt sense of getting better, distinct from actually being good, since a learner can be improving and still feel stuck if nothing shows them the improvement. Relatedness is a social bond connected to the learning itself, a person or group the learner’s English progress actually matters to, not merely a person nearby while they study.

The same research found something specific to English-as-a-second-language learners worth naming directly: their motivation was disproportionately anchored to an external requirement, usually a passing grade needed for university entrance, more than either the heritage-language or foreign-language groups in the same study (Noels, Adrian-Taylor, Saumure & Katz, 2019). An external requirement is a real reason to start studying English. It is a fragile reason to keep studying once the requirement is met, which is exactly the pattern the next three sections work through one need at a time.

Why Does Losing Control Over What You Study Make You Want to Quit?

Losing autonomy, the sense that a learner is choosing to study English for their own reasons, correlates with the two outcomes that matter most: how likely a learner is to become amotivated, and whether they intend to keep going. In a study of 159 university-level second-language learners, Kimberly Noels and colleagues measured perceived freedom of choice directly against amotivation and intention to continue, alongside a more self-determined form of motivation for comparison.

Motivation type	Correlation with autonomy (freedom of choice)	Correlation with felt competence	Correlation with anxiety	Correlation with intention to continue
Amotivation (no felt reason to study)	-0.49	-0.23	not significant	-0.35
Identified regulation (studying for a personally chosen reason)	0.55	0.35	-0.31	0.56

Table: Pearson correlations between motivation subtype and autonomy, competence, anxiety, and intention to continue, N = 159 (Noels, Pelletier, Clément & Vallerand, 2000).

The pattern is symmetrical: low perceived choice tracks with amotivation and a weaker intention to continue, while high perceived choice tracks with the opposite on both. Extensive reading research shows the same mechanism from a different angle. A 2014 study of learner autonomy in reading programs found that letting learners pick their own books, rather than assigning the same title to everyone, is what keeps reading identity and reading motivation correlated at r = .64 rather than collapsing under reading anxiety, which itself correlated at r = -.52 with motivation (Lake & Holster, 2014). One of the researchers behind that program summarized the goal in a single sentence: “Our long-term goal is to have students who do not stop reading when the reading class is over” (Hudson, 2007, as quoted in Lake & Holster, 2014).

Choosing a story worth finishing, the approach covered in learning English through stories, is autonomy applied directly: a learner who picks their own book, comic, or audiobook chapter is exercising the same freedom of choice this research measured.

Why Does Not Feeling Any Progress Kill Motivation Faster Than Difficulty Does?

A learner can handle material that is hard. What erodes motivation faster is material where improvement is invisible, because competence in self-determination theory is a felt sense of getting better, not an objective fact about a learner’s skill. The same 159-learner study found perceived competence correlated negatively with amotivation (r = -.23) and positively with a self-determined reason to keep studying (r = .35), confirming that a learner’s belief in their own progress, not only their actual level, drives whether they keep going (Noels, Pelletier, Clément & Vallerand, 2000).

A larger, more recent study of English learners specifically makes the same point with a bigger sample and a direct engagement measure rather than an intention to continue.

r = 0.817 — correlation between satisfied psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) and classroom behavioral engagement, among 687 Chinese senior high school EFL students

Source: Liu, Wang & Wang, 2025

The same study found needs satisfaction correlated with motivation at r = .588 and negatively with boredom at r = -.545, and that boredom was the strongest single link between unmet needs and disengagement (Liu, Wang & Wang, 2025). Boredom, in other words, is frequently a competence problem wearing a different name: a learner bored by English practice is often a learner who cannot tell whether today’s session moved them forward at all.

Matching material to a level where progress is visible, rather than material so far above a learner’s level that every session feels identical to the last, is what comprehensible input and finding your right English reading level is built around. A learner who can feel a book, comic, or audiobook getting easier over weeks is getting the competence signal this research says motivation actually depends on.

Does Learning English With Other People Actually Keep You Motivated?

Yes, but the research is specific about which kind of social contact helps. Kimberly Noels and colleagues asked heritage-language, foreign-language, and English-as-a-second-language learners how teachers, family, peers, and members of the target-language community encouraged or discouraged their motivation, and informative feedback, being told something specific about how to improve, was the most valued form of encouragement across every group and every source (Noels, Adrian-Taylor, Saumure & Katz, 2019). Simply being around other people studying English was not the active ingredient; knowing that a specific person cared whether a learner improved, and would tell them how, was.

The discouraging side of the same data is just as specific. Among responses about how members of the English-speaking community discouraged learners, negative feedback, criticism that pointed out a limitation without offering any way to fix it, was the single most common category, cited in over a third of all discouraging encounters reported (Noels, Adrian-Taylor, Saumure & Katz, 2019). Relatedness, in this research, is damaged by the same kind of contact that should build it, when that contact carries no information the learner can actually use.

For an English learner without a classroom full of peers, this points to a concrete substitute rather than a vague call to “practice with others.” Sharing what a learner is reading, a chapter of a graded story or a comic discussed with a friend, functions as the same social bond the research measured, which is why pairing comics and graphic novels with a friend or family member to discuss works as relatedness support even outside a classroom.

Do Streaks, Grades, and Rewards Help or Undermine Motivation?

They can help, but only when they sit on top of a need that is already being met, not in place of one. Self-determination theory distinguishes between motivation that is externally regulated, driven by an outside reward or requirement, and motivation that is internalized, where a learner has made the reason their own, and the research is explicit that the two do not substitute for each other:

“Externally imposed rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation because they constrain personal autonomy.”

— Noels, Adrian-Taylor, Saumure & Katz

The English-as-a-second-language learners in the same study, whose motivation was disproportionately anchored to passing a required entrance exam, illustrate the risk directly: an external requirement reliably starts study, but it gives a learner no reason to continue once the requirement is satisfied, unlike the heritage- and foreign-language learners who described more of their own, self-chosen reasons for continuing.

This is not an argument against streaks, points, or grades. It is an argument about what they can and cannot fix. A badge or a streak counter measures whether a learner opened an app, the same limitation covered in how to build an English learning habit that lasts, and the vocabulary-specific version of this same distinction, between a game mechanic that rewards real practice and one that only rewards showing up, is covered in do English learning games actually improve vocabulary. A reward layered on top of content a learner actually chose adds motivation. The same reward layered on top of content a learner has no say over adds pressure instead, which is precisely what the autonomy research above says erodes motivation rather than restoring it.

What Actually Keeps English Learners Motivated Long-Term?

Sustained motivation to learn English holds up when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are built into how a learner studies, not added as an afterthought once interest has already faded. Concretely, that means real choice over what to read, listen to, or watch; material leveled closely enough to a learner’s own ability that progress is visible from one week to the next; and a person or a shared story that gives the practice a social reason to continue, not merely a private obligation.

Storybook, from Dobi Apps, is built around the autonomy side of this directly: its App Store listing describes a library of more than 1,000,000 books, comics, and audiobooks, which means a learner picks a story because they want to know what happens next, the same self-chosen reason for continuing that Lake & Holster’s research on reading autonomy found keeps learners reading past the end of a class. Audiobook, Dobi Apps’ other English-learning app, organizes its A1 to C2 leveled library so that competence stays visible: a learner moving up a level is a concrete, checkable sign of progress rather than a vague feeling.

Neither app manufactures relatedness on its own; that half depends on a learner having someone to tell about a chapter, a comic, or an audiobook they finished. What the research above supports is narrower and more useful than a single tool: motivation fails when one of three specific needs goes unmet, and a learner or a parent choosing among the top apps for learning English can ask, of any one of them, which of the three it actually protects.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is losing motivation to learn English the same thing as being lazy?

No. Self-determination theory research defines the specific state where a learner sees no link between their effort and any result as amotivation, and describes it as a situation where a person has no reason, intrinsic or extrinsic, to keep going. That is a psychological state produced by unmet needs, usually for competence or autonomy, not a character flaw.

Will switching to a new app or textbook fix lost motivation?

Only if the switch actually restores one of the three needs. A new app that still removes choice over content, still gives no sense of progress, or still offers no social reason to continue will fade the same way the old one did. The fix is what changes, not the fact of changing.

Can streaks, badges, or grades ever help motivation, or do they only hurt it?

They can help, but only as a supplement to a need that is already being met, not a replacement for it. Self-determination theory research notes that externally imposed rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation by constraining a learner’s sense of autonomy, so a streak paired with content a learner has no say over works against motivation rather than for it.

Sources

📖 Read the original article on the Dobi Apps blog: Why English Learners Lose Motivation and Quit

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