Intelligent Personal Assistant - an interlocutor to mollify Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety

Speaking in a second/foreign language, especially in English, is one of the most anxiety-provoking tasks for language learners. Anxiety provoked while speaking in a second language distresses the learners and further affects their oral proficiency in English. This article focuses on investigating the presence of anxiety among (n = 86) first-year Arts and Science students of a reputed university in India through Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety (FLSA) scale. The researchers tested the presence of anxiety pre and post-usage of Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) in Second Language (SL) classroom through the FLSA scale to deduce the impact of IPA-assisted language learning on speaking anxiety. Besides quantitative analysis, an in-depth interview was conducted with (n = 10) students to shed further insights on the significance of the study through qualitative inputs. Students who were interviewed voiced that they felt less anxious while conversing with IPA, and it paves way for ample practice and makes them feel comfortable while speaking in SL. The results revealed that the students had moderate to serious levels of anxiety in second language classrooms and the usage of IPA has significantly reduced their FLSA.