In this study attempts were made to investigate the degree of students'rnintrinsic motivation for studying listening and the motivational roles of the listeningrntasks, the listening texts and the instructors in the listening classes of CollegernEnglish in relation to students' achievement in the listening tests at the AddisrnAbeba University Freshman Programmer.rnSeventy- seven students from College of Social Sciences and seventy-onernfrom Science Faculty completed a questionnaire and twenty of these studentsrnwere interviewed. These students' results on the two listening tests given by therndepartment during the first semester were collected. To cross check therninformation given by the students, a questionnaire was administered to twentyrninstructors.rnDescriptive statistical analysis was first employed to analyse the responsesrngiven to each item. The analysis showed that the students' intrinsic motivation isrnaccounted for by their perception of the relevance of the skill, the tasks and therntexts to their needs in the academic setting. Correlational analysis was then madernto see the interrelations among the variables. This analysis showed significantrnrelationship among each other. Then, multiple reg ression models of analysisrnwere employed to examine the contribution of the motivational variables to thernstudents' achievement. The analysis revealed that the motivational variablesrntogether explained 46.2% of the variation in the students' achievement scores.rnThe stepwise regression model confirmed that the greatest of th is contributionrnwas accounted for by the students' intrinsic motivation . To see if the motivatingrnnatures of the listening tasks, the tasks, and the instructors have significantlyrndifferent effects on social science and natural science students, a t-test wasrnemployed for comparing the mean scores. Accordingly, the motivational roles ofrnthe listening tasks and texts did not have significantly different effects on the tworngroups of students, but the instructors' motivational role had significantly differentrneffect on the two groups. The mean scores of each motivational variable showedrnthat they had a varying degree of motivating power. The instructors' responsesrnto the qualitative data collected through the interview and the open-ended itemsrnin the questionnaire also confirmed this finding.rnFin ally it has been recommended that students' awareness of thernrelevance of the listening component in the course should be more developed andrnthe department should organize a workshop for the instructors to narrow the gaprnbetween the instructors' practices to motivate students to study listening.