Recent research on desertion in Colombian universities has highlighted the relationship between students’ low academic performance and their difficulties in disciplinary reading and writing. So, the institutions of higher education (IES) have developed different actions to address this situation, some of them are: the creation of academic literacy centers, the implementation of institutional policies of mother tongue, and the training of their teachers to guide reading and writing within their subjects. Despite these advances, the universities main strategy to enhance the reading and writing processes of their students conti-nues to be the offer of initial mandatory courses in their curricula. For this reason, it is important to take care of these academic spaces in order to provide a better learning experience for students. In view of the above, this document contains various theoretical elements that have contributed to the development of language teaching in higher education to highlight three fundamental points: a) the epistemological conceptions that would sustain the teaching practices in these subjects, b) the concepts of reading and writing that should be present in them; and c) some suggestions on how to teach the central study objects of these courses.