| Summary: | The study is based on the answers of 106 international students of Spanish as a foreign language from three different private schools in Madrid. The purpose of this paper is to study, firstly, whether or how the intrinsic motivation of adult Spanish learners, their choice of strategies and the time they spend on vocabulary learning outside of the school, are influenced by the their age, gender or mother tongue. Secondly, the aim of this study is to identify whether learners with a higher degree of intrinsic motivation use more of their free time on vocabulary learning and whether they use a greater variety of vocabulary learning strategies than learners with a lesser degree of intrinsic motivation. Apart from the learning intensity and strategic variety, there is the aim of finding particular strategies preferred by the two different motivation groups. The hypothesis regarding the first part of the study is that, while gender and mother tongue probably won't influence the students' intrinsic motivation or the time they spend on vocabulary learning outside of the classroom, age, and in that sense, responsibility, will. Also, learners from different parts of the world are likely to apply different strategies in order to learn and remember the vocabulary so the mother tongue is important regarding their choice of strategies. The hypothesis regarding the second part of this study is that learners with a high degree of intrinsic motivation will use more of their time on vocabulary learning, they will apply a greater variety of vocabulary learning strategies and are more likely to use mnemotechnics and look for conversation possibilities than learners with a lesser degree of intrinsic motivation. The evidence from this empirical study partly supports the hypothesis. Gender had influence on the participants' intrinsic motivation. The evidence suggests that female learners have a higher degree of intrinsic motivation than the male learners. Correlations were found between the metacognitive and cognitive learning strategies of the Romanic and Germanic language group suggesting that learners with a Romanic mother tongue tend to use more metacognitive strategies than any other language group of the research. As for the Germanic mother tongue, the evidence suggest that learners belonging to this group tend to use more cognitive strategies than learners with a Romanic mother tongue. Also, the research results suggest that learners with a higher degree of intrinsic motivation use more time on vocabulary learning. Furthermore, the results indicate that learners with a higher degree of the intrinsic motivation tend to use more memory strategies than those learners with a lower degree of intrinsic motivation.
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