TEACHING ACADEMIC TEXTS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF GENRE THEORY Somale, Marisel Adriana Universidad Nacional de Villa María masomale@gmail.com Abstract Teaching academic writing has been studied in a wide number of research works at Universidad Nacional de Villa María, and it is presently a challenge for teachers at the English Teacher Training College in their attempt to help students go through the process of academic literacy. This process promotes the gradual acquisition of specialised ways of critical thinking brought about by discourse conventions (Carlino, 2013, Prior and Bilbro, 2011). The texts our students must read and write are action mediators in the academic community in which they follow textual models. Thus, the development of reading and academic writing as linguistic macro-skills is of utmost importance in learners´ and future professionals´ lives, and the process of academic literacy, through which these skills develop, should tend to promote the sense of belonging to a discursive scientific community requiring competence and knowledge of the foreign language and its use. The difficulties in the production of academic genres of evaluation in the context of the English Teacher Training College show the need to make explicit the key features of these genres. Hyland (2003)advocates genre-based teaching has a remarkable potential among students of a foreign language because the knowledge of prototypical aspects facilitates the composition of texts and favours the use of the foreign language for communication. In this presentation, we will share some advances of a research work carried out at UNVM, whose main objective is to promote among students the development of the necessary abilities to become competent users of academic genres. literacy genre writing Introduction Teaching academic texts in the context of genre theory at the English Teacher Training College (UNVM) is a deliberate attempt to cope with the difficulties our