The bar charts illustrate the percentage of male and female students aged 14-16 who studied a foreign language in an English speaking nation in the years 1984 and 2007, and the most popular foreign languages that were studied during the same period.
Overall, a significantly larger proportion of girls studied a foreign language than that of boys in both given years, and a lower percentage of students, regardless of their gender, did so in the latter year. Additionally, despite a significant decrease in the study of French and German, both languages remained more popular than Spanish, which saw a rise in its popularity.
In 1984, nearly half of all 14-to 16-year-old female students studied a foreign language, compared to 30% of their male counterparts. By 2007, however, the figures for both sexes had declined slightly to 40% and approximately 25%, respectively.
In terms of the foreign languages that were studied in 1984, French accounted for 50%, followed distantly by German (20%) and Spanish (5%). Thereafter, while the proportion of students learning French and German dropped by 25% and 5% in 2007, in that order, that of Spanish experienced a two-fold increase, reaching 10%.