COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE ATTITUDE AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF BAHASA MELAYU AMONGST URBAN AND RURAL MALAY STUDENTS

Previous studies have proven that besides culture, psychology and social background of a speaker, geography can also be a factor to study speaker’s attitude towards language. hence, this study aims to explain the attitude of urban and rural malay students towards the bahasa melayu subject. this study will also compare the communicative competence of these two groups of malay students. for this purpose, descriptive and inferential statistical approach was applied to 421 respondents aged 11 years old. a set of questionnaire and a set of malay communicative competence test were used as instruments to gather data for this study. results show that the percentage of the rural malay students who consider malay language as very important is much higher than the urban malay students. percentage of rural malay students who are interested in the malay subject is higher than the urban malay students because they find the subject easy. while the percentage of malay urban students who do not like the malay subject because it is easy is much higher than the rural students. the findings also show that the increase of percentage in the usage of malay language among urban malay students is influenced by parents and family, rather than their teachers, friends and society. the mean of malay communicative competence of urban malay students is 30.89, while the mean of rural malay students is 32.15. the t-test shows that the mean difference of the communicative competence of the malay language (p=.103) for both groups is insignificant.