The Huffington Post, with Middlebury Interactive, recently presented an infographic:  Second Language Acquisition by the Numbers.  It makes a compelling case for increasing language instruction in the United States with facts about the languages most studied, language learning advantages, U.S. world language learning in comparison with the European Union, and the percentage of U.S. schools offering world language instruction.

Considering the number of English language learners (ELLs) in our schools, it is always surprising how few people in the U.S. are bilingual or multilingual.  We continue to have huge numbers of ELLs losing their home language rather than becoming truly bilingual, and we have far too few English-dominant students who ever study another language beyond two years in high school.