This study investigated the motivational orientations of undergraduates in learning Mandarin as a foreign language in a Malaysian public university. The subjects were four hundred and twenty-three Malay undergraduates who enrolled in a level three Mandarin course. A 30-item five-point Likert scale questionnaire which integrated Gardner's socio-educational model and Dörnyei's framework of second language (L2) motivation was used to gather data on the respondents' integrative, instrumental and attitudinal motivations. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Results indicated that generally the students were highly motivated to learn Mandarin as a foreign language. They were both integratively and instrumentally motivated but were more oriented towards attitudinal motivation in learning Mandarin as a foreign language. Moreover, the students were more inclined towards the teacher-specific than the course-specific and group-specific sources of attitudinal motivation in learning Mandarin. These results offer useful practical instructional implications concerning the students' motivational orientations in the Mandarin language classroom.

This quantitative study is done to explore factors for learning Mandarin among undergraduates. A purposive sample of 168 participants responded to the survey. The participants are non-native speakers who were learning Mandarin language as a foreign language. They consisted of 48% diploma students and 52 % of degree students in a Malaysian public university. The instrument used is a 5 Likert-scale survey and is rooted from learning strategies by (Wenden and Rubin, 1987). The survey has 4 sections which include items on participants' demographic profile, cognitive components, metacognitive self-regulation component and resource management component. Findings of the studies show that factors for language learning for instance attention, reproduction, retention and motivation show significant correlation among each others which indicated that these factors have significant influence on Mandarin language learning among learners. However, help-seeking in motivation factor is the strategies most preferred by learners to improve language learning.