The Impact of Conducting AI-Scaffolding Flipped Classrooms on Alleviating Academic Anxiety of Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract- Learning a new language has its own psychological challenges among which the anxiety index received the highest attention. Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) chat bots in the field of language acquisition might deemed effective as they provide EFL learners with more audacity to activate and trigger the passive knowledge into an accurate and cohesive output, resulting in a considerable decline in the debilitative notion of academic anxiety index. This study aimed at depicting the engagement of Artificial Intelligence bots into the process of EFL learners’ writing tasks outside the classrooms as they received corrected feedback through AI in a flipped fashion of practice. From the subject pool of 171 Iranian EFL sophomore participants, 63 were selected via an OPT test of language proficiency, and randomly assigned into two groups of experimental and one control. The experimental groups were trained to receive corrective feedback in flipped instruction practice, one experimental via AI-scaffolding and one experimental via teacher-assisted AI-scaffolding, to improve their performance in writing tasks. The control group followed the conventional trend and received no AI scaffolding. The design of the present study was quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design. The accredited anxiety questionnaire along with a validated writing-tasks test, were the instrument of the present study and they were administered before and after the treatment. The data obtained from the pretest and posttest phases went through statistical analysis by computer program SPSS 24. The result confirmed that the teacher-assisted AI-scaffolding group outperformed the artificial-intelligence-scaffolding group significantly and it was due to the facilitative teacher assistance in applying AI-prompts while receiving AI scaffolding conducting the corrective feedback in writing course. The findings would be beneficial for EFL teachers, learners, policy makers in the TEFL field.