This research report is an account of a study carried out at the Foreign Language Institute of a Colombian public university. Its main purposes were to analyze the teaching practices the participating teachers used in their English lessons, and to assess the effects of these practices on the development of students' communicative competence. A qualitative-descriptive methodology was followed by means of lesson observations and semi-structured interviews. A quantitative data analysis of test results was also undertaken to measure the development of students' communicative competence. Pre-communicative teaching practices were found to be more frequent than communicative ones. Likewise, certain aspects of the students' organizational and pragmatic competences were also enhanced.