The Effectiveness of Icebreaker Activities to Enhance Students’ Speaking Skill:

Abstract

Students encounter many difficulties throughout their journey to master a foreign language. This calls teachers into action to seek new teaching strategies and approaches. The current research attempted to investigate the effectiveness of an icebreaker-based approach to enhance Algerian EFL students’ speaking skill. Therefore, a case study was carried out with second-year students at the Department of English, Yahia Fares University, Medea. This survey used a mixed method to collect and describe the data. Two groups were tested before and after using icebreaker activities while learning to speak English. Each group was investigated separately to guarantee a spontaneous performance and reliable results. The findings revealed significant differences in informants’ motivation and interaction when using warm up activities in the classroom. The participants showed remarkable enthusiasm when learning to speak after the use of icebreakers. As a conclusion, icebreakers have been proved to be an effective tool that inspires students who are disinterested in learning English in general and speaking skill in particular. They create a collaborative, interactive learning environment that requires the active, rather than passive,