The motivation to learn a foreign language is a complex process. According to the Ministry of National Education of Colombia -MEN-, speaking English is a generic competence to be developed at all educational levels. In this regard and based on the Theory of Self-Determination -SDT-, this qualitative phenomenological study aims to identify and analyse the aspects related to the motivation to learn English in undergraduate students of the Virtual and Distance modalities -E-Learning-. The main instrument used for data collection was a semi-structured individual interviews. The participants in the research were a group of 16 women and 3 men. The analysis was carried out through semantic categorizations and with the support of NVivo 11 software, which lets assume that motivation for learning English is strongly influenced by external factors.