Language Attitudes of Undergraduate Students towards English, Urdu and Punjabi: A Comparative Study of Public and Private Institutes of Lahore.

Abstract

The study explores the language attitudes of undergraduate students towards English, Urdu and Punjabi. Baker (1992) takes the view, that depending on the attitudes held by society, a language will succeed or fail. The theoretical framework implemented for this study was Baker's 1992 model. This is an in-depth study that explored the attitudes of 272 graduate students from Lahore's two public and two private sector universities. This analysis employed qualitative as well as quantitative approaches. The findings showed strongly optimistic attitudes of undergraduate students in both sectors towards English as well as Urdu, and the least favorable attitudes towards Punjabi. Students from both industries displayed similar gender-based attitudes toward the three languages.