The Effects of Biweekly Videos on L2 Speaking Anxiety more

Sun, May 1, 13:30-Tue, May 31, 23:55 Asia/Seoul

Flipgrid is a smartphone application and website which allows for private video creation, uploading, viewing, and replying. It is popular with teachers as they can assign speaking practice for homework, monitor student videos, modify topics, easily upload class information, and is free. Students can practice, personalize, and post their own videos which gives them the locus of control, as well as listen to and reply to their classmates' videos. Using technology as a medium of communication has been a method which promotes willingness to communicate and decrease anxiety as AbuSeileek (2012), Baralt & Gurzynski-Weiss (2011) and Reinders & Wattana (2014) have found. However, none of these studies have focused on student-created videos. If students cannot produce output, they will be unable to fully engage in language development (Gregersen, MacIntyre, & Meza 2014) and speaking anxiety increases. Considering this, how does creating and watching videos affect learners' speaking anxiety? To investigate this question, six EFL classes (n=135) from a private Japanese university made five Flipgrid videos every 2-3 weeks over a 15-week semester as well as watched classmates' videos. These videos were related to their textbook topics, with students being allowed to plan or not, depending on their preference. A questionnaire was created with selected questions from the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986), and The Shortened Scale of Second Language Listening Anxiety (Kimura, 2017). This new questionnaire concerned L2 speaking anxiety and was translated into the students' L1. Both the experimental group and the control group (n=147) were given the questionnaire as pre- and post-tests, however the experimental group also had questions about using Flipgrid. It was found that using Flipgrid significantly reduced certain aspects of anxiety. In this presentation, I will discuss the research project and how speaking anxiety was affected by this technology use.