Band 8+: The charts below illustrate the proportions of American students at a university in the United States who were able to speak languages other than English, in 2005 and 2015. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The given charts depict how the percentages of American students at a single university in the United States who were able to speak languages other than English varied in the years 2005 and 2015.

Overall, it is immediately clear that American students with no additional languages significantly decreased over the period. In addition, the figure for two additional languages had a slight decline. In contrast to these changes, only Spanish, only French and another language categories experienced an increase in a decade. The students with only German levelled off in this period.

To begin with, the category of no additional language, accounting for the greatest share. fell from 45% to approximately a third. Similarly, two additional languages witnessed a downward trend, but less pronounced, from 14% in 2005 to 12% in 2015.

Following the remaining data in detail, only Spain category had a considerable rise, from 18% to 29%. ‘Only French’ also grew just by 2% to 10% by 2015. The only constant category was ‘only German’ which remained in 5% in the both years.