Question

The charts below show the proportions of British students at one university in England who were able to speak other languages in addition to English, in 2013 and 2023. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Model Answer

The pie charts depict the range of languages, other than English, spoken by students at an English university in 2013 and 2023. Overall, we can see that there was a slight increase in students speaking at least one additional language.

The key difference between 2023 and 2013 is that the proportion of students who could only speak English halved from 20% of the student body to just 10%. Despite this change, no one foreign language came to dominate.

In terms of languages spoken, in 2023, 55% of students spoke one of the main European languages: French, German, or Spanish, which was the same proportion as in 2013. Spanish remained the most commonly spoken language other than English, increasing from 30% to 35% in total.

Additionally, there was a small rise in the proportion of students speaking more than one language or speaking another unspecified language, each of which rose by 5 percentage points to 15% and 20%, respectively.

(158 words)