This study investigated deeply into what happened when a language learner made failure and success. The question is how and what learners do to make improvements and achievements and/or to turn their learning results worse. Adopting grounded theory methodology and ethnographic perspective with prolong observations and interviews as the basis of data collection and analysis, the researcher studied the learning stories of 8 participants in 24 months to build up a general formula explaining how

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... rovements and achievements operate. Motivation and autonomy were classified as the two central and most stable constructs in a holistic model containing numerous changing affective factors. Results showed that it is not really because of any single change in any individual factor/construct, but the operation of this whole model shapes the success and failure in language learning.