In this study, I examined how French as a foreign language learners’ self-reported and physiological anxiety (measured via heart rate) fluctuated across three learning environments: VR, Zoom, and a face-to-face classroom. I also examined how lower anxiety impacted learners’ oral production at the levels of pronunciation, fluency, and complexity during peer-to-peer speaking tasks. There were thirty-eight (N = 38) learners of French enrolled in a course designed to develop Advanced French oral proficiency who participated in this study. At the onset, participants’ background and baseline self-reported anxiety were established via a background and foreign language anxiety questionnaire. Participants then completed six rounds of comparable 20-minute three-way peer-to-peer interpersonal consensus building tasks in French over a 12-week period in three different environments: two in a classroom, two in Zoom and two in the social VR application, vTime XR. All tasks were video recorded for further analyses. Participants’ heart rate was continuously tracked during each task using Polar OH1 heart rate monitors. Immediately after each task, participants self-reported their anxiety via a questionnaire. Upon completing the final task, semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand participants’ perceptions of the three learning environments. Participants’ self-reported anxiety data and physiological measures indicated that learners, particularly those who were more anxious initially, were less anxious overall in virtual spaces. Participants were also found to be more comprehensible, intelligible, and fluent in VR and when they were less anxious, confirming the beneficial impact of VR for language learning and the need to alleviate anxiety in learners to enable them to be more successful. Furthermore, analyses of how focus group participants’ heart rates evolved throughout activities in response to their unfolding conversations and the surrounding environment brought to light various factors within each learning environment that both alleviated and worsened anxiety. Finally, participants’ insights into how they experienced the three environments indicated that learners were overall more at ease in the virtual environments, but that they perceived many drawbacks of using Zoom and found that VR more closely resembled in-person interactions and provided a contextually relevant setting, suggesting that it could offer a better solution to online learning.