Abstract:

The effort of teaching a foreign language and through language, culture and civilisation of others, still occupy all those involved in the linguistic educational process. In recent decades, the main principles of second language teaching, focuses on teaching language and culture as a whole, with a great concern about the means of communication in specific social based situations.
In recent years, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has widespread in second language learning and teaching environments. Learners are now interacting with a variety of semiotic modes - through image, video, sound, new forms of written and spoken texts - in a complex multilingual communicative universe.
In the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (abbreviated as CEFR), which is widely adopted and accepted as the European standard for teaching and learning foreign languages we find the key notion of speech acts. Speech acts are at the heart of teaching and the core development of communicative language skills in the sense that they describe what learners can do with language in specific contexts or in a particular communicative situation.
But, is there a relationship between traditional speech acts and the new digital genres such as blogs, micro-blogs or wikis used in the web 2.0 era? And furthermore, is it possible to develop learner’s language skills by teaching and using speech acts in these environments?
In the above context, in this paper we first illustrate current needs in teaching and learning second languages, then we discuss the design of a multimedia database model and finally the creation of a web application capable of presenting speech acts of French language in web 2.0 environments.

Keywords:

Multimedia database, second language learning, language teaching, information and communication technologies.