Usage of Virtual Reality in Combating Social Anxiety Disorders in Non-native English Speakers: A Survey

TL;DR

This paper surveys how Virtual Reality can help non-native English speakers reduce social anxiety and improve public speaking skills, highlighting current benefits and limitations in this application.

Contribution

It summarizes current knowledge on VR's role in aiding NNES students with social anxiety, emphasizing potential advantages over native speakers.

Findings

VR benefits NNES students' social-emotional training

NNES students may achieve better results with VR than NES students

Current research reflects broad topics in VR and social anxiety

Abstract

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a common yet underestimated mental health disorder. While non-native English speaker (NNES) students face public speaking, they are more likely to suffer some public speaking anxiety (PSA) due to linguistic and sociocultural differences \cite{cite1}. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has already benefitted social-emotional training. The core objective is to summarise the benefits and limitations of using VR technology to help NNES students practice and improve their public speaking skills. This is not a comprehensive survey of the literature. Instead, the selected papers are intended to reflect the current knowledge across various broad topics. Virtual Reality, Social Anxiety Disorder, Public Speaking Anxiety, English as a Second Language, and Non native English speakers are the keywords used for searching mainly in the Academic Search Complete (ASC) database. Compared with native English speaker (NES) students, NNES students have the potential to achieve better results when using VR technology for PSA social-emotional training.