This study explores how an information and communications technology (ICT) didactic design based on web 2.0 tools can enhance foreign language students’ oral competences, specifically informal dialogue. Quantitative and qualitative data from surveys conducted among upper secondary language teachers and students show that many students fail to reach satisfactory results when engaging in informal, everyday dialogue in the foreign language. The data also show that ICT is not commonly used here.

Theories on dialogue create an overview of the characteristics of the informal dialogue and the difficulties in teaching this speech genre. This, combined with theories on colla-borative learning, language teaching and didactics, leads to a presentation of an innova-tive ICT didactic design using the web 2.0 tools Lino, Quizlet, VoiceThread and Skype.

The design is tested on Danish upper secondary school students in their third year of French language studies. The analyses show that these students engage actively in the collaborative process of enhancing their oral skills by creating mind-maps on Lino, glos-sary study sets on Quizlet, asynchronous dialogues on VoiceThread and finally engaging in synchronous dialogues on Skype.

The study concludes that the students improved their skills in informal foreign language dialogue by exploring and testing the characteristics of this genre collaboratively and progressively through the web 2.0 tools in the design. The study argues that these results could be further improved by allowing more space for feedback. This is presented in a redesign.