From knowledge telling to knowledge transforming : Towards a new view of writing in English language teaching in Italian universities in the last two decades of the 20th century

The late 1970s marked the beginning of a long period of experimentation in the teaching of English language (as opposed to its literature) in Italian universities, which mainly involved academics working in non-linguistic faculties (Politics, Economics and Commerce, etc.). In the 1980s and the 1990s, applied research in ESP (English for Specific Purposes) became particularly prominent and led to the publication of several teaching materials aimed at Italian university students which mainly focused on the teaching of reading. In the international context, on the other hand the 1980s and the 1990s saw a reappraisal of writing not only as an essential component of a student’s communicative competence but also as a key skill in the process of acquisition of new knowledge. In this paper, I will investigate how increasingly more importance was given to writing in the Italian university context in the last two decades of the 20th century, through the analysis of a corpus of ESP materials aimed at Italian university students.