Can E-portfolios Reduce Foreign Language Anxiety in Online Speaking Courses during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

E-portfolios have been used successfully to boost the EFL students' speaking performance for over a decade. Nevertheless, e-portfolios have never been profoundly reported to reduce foreign language anxiety (henceforth, FLA), especially in an online speaking course during the COVID-19 pandemic requiring fully online forms. We, therefore, investigated (1) the effect of e-portfolios on students' FLA and (2) the difference in FLA between male and female students given e-portfolios. This study employed a mixed- methods experimental design involving an experiment followed by interviews. The participants comprised 120 English education majors at a state university in Indonesia who took an online speaking class due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They were divided into the experiment (60 students) and control (60 students) groups. We collected the data by distributing the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale through an online survey platform as the pretest and posttest. Ten willing students were invited for interviews after the experiment was over. The results indicated that students' FLA decreased significantly when they were using e-portfolios in their online speaking courses. Additionally, no significant difference in FLA was identified between male and female students in the experiment group. According to the interview findings, activities in e-portfolios gave an equal opportunity for male and female students to reduce their FLA. We also discuss four pedagogical implications for alleviating FLA in online speaking courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.