The given charts illustrate the proportion of foreign language learners aged 14-16 in an English-speaking nation and the most popular languages that were studied in the years 1984 and 2007.
Overall, it can be seen that girls were more interested in studying a foreign language than males in both given years, with a higher figure illustrated. Additionally, despite a significant decrease in the study of French, it still registered the highest figure among all languages surveyed throughout the period.
Looking closely at the chart, nearly half of 14-16-year-old females studied a foreign language in 1984, compared to 30% of their male counterparts. By 2007, a downward progression was seen in the language learning participation of both genders, with the former dropping to exactly 40%, still trumping the latter by roughly 12%.
In terms of the studied foreign languages, French accounted for the majority of 50%, followed distantly by German (20%) and Spanish (5%). Thereafter, while the rate of students learning French and German plummeted to half and 15% respectively, the reverse trend was true for Spanish, experiencing a two-fold increase to 10% by the final year.