The aim of this study is to illustrate the relationships among topic-interest, topic-usefulness, and motivational orientation. A total of 138 students in six different English language courses in a university in Korea took part in the study. Two sets of identical questionnaires were used before and after the semester. They asked the learners to rate the degrees of motivational orientation and the levels of interest and usefulness on the topics in the textbook. The results show that there was an interesting pattern that the level of correlation between topic-interest and integrative motivation was higher than that between topic-interest and instrumental motivation. In case of the correlations between topic-interest and topic-usefulness, moderate levels of positive correlations are shown. However, it was difficult to find a strong relationship in the levels of topic-interest between before and after the use of the textbooks. The average correlation is calculated as .27, indicating a very low level of relationship. The overall results suggest that teachers need to identify their learners" reasons for studying English to choose a textbook that meets the learners" motivational orientation. Teachers also need to evaluate how textbook writers maximize their creativeness in presenting topics in textbooks.