The bar charts indicate the percentage of students aged 14 to 16 learning a second language in an English-speaking country as well as the three most learned languages in 1984 and 2007. Overall, the period between 1984 and 2007 witnessed a downward trend regarding the rate of teenage females and males learning foreign languages. Simultaneously, there was a fall in the proportion of students studying German and French while the opposite was true for Spanish.
In 1984, approximately 50% of boys opted for a foreign language, about 20% higher than girls. At the same time, only 5% of 14-to-16-year-old pupils learned Spanish, nearly one-tenth as much as French (50%) whereas one-fifth of adolescents studied German.
Between 1984 and 2007, the rate of male teenage pupils learning a second language declined by one-tenth (50% compared to 40%) along with a slight decrease to 35% in 2007 in the proportion of girls studying a foreign language. Furthermore, despite a significant drop of 15% in the number of teenage students, French still led the chart while the opposite was true for Spanish with a marginal rise from 5% in 1984 to one-tenth in 2007.