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“Korean middle school students’ English learning motivation and demotivation.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 39.2. (2013): 245-274. This paper aims to investigate Korean middle school students’ motivation and demotivation in learning English. To date, only a small number of studies have investigated both motivation and demotivation of Korean middle school students’ English learning. A questionnaire with 20 Likert-scale items for motivation and 40 items for demotivation was administered to 457 middle school students in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. A variety of quantitative analyses revealed that there existed four factors for motivation and eight factors for demotivation among the participants. Results indicated that students having high English proficiency had a higher level of English learning motivation than those having low proficiency in all four sub-factors. For students with low English proficiency, as they advance to a higher school grade, their level of motivation gradually decreased whereas that of demotivation increased. The factors having the highest mean score among the demotivational factors were Compulsory Nature of L2 Study and Reduced Self-confidence, which were even seen in high proficiency student group. Statistical results also suggested that motivation and demotivation were not opposite concepts. This implies that intensely competitive classroom atmosphere in Korea focusing on College Scholastic Ability Test influenced both high and low proficiency groups’ patterns in motivation and demotivation.