Tricia Thrasher, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of French and Italian, was recently named a Duolingo Research Grant Awardee for 2020.

This year, Duolingo, a free science-based language education platform, introduced the Duolingo Research Grant program to “support the next generation of language researchers”.

Thrasher’s project, “Social Virtual Reality’s Impact on Language Anxiety and Interpersonal Oral Production by French Learners,” examines how virtual reality (VR) can alleviate foreign language anxiety and improve oral production in French. By combining self-reported and physiological anxiety data (heart rate), it will track how anxiety fluctuates and impacts speech throughout L2 interactions across three learning environments: a traditional classroom, VR, and Zoom.

Thrasher is pursuing a Ph.D. in French Linguistics with a concentration in Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education.