The purpose of this article is to explore, based on the review of some documents on curricular policy in Colombian education, the construction of the field of language teaching in the last two decades of the 20th century. The analysis of these texts reveals a first approach centered on behaviorism and the perspective of grammar, which was then put into discussion by the cognitive approach and the discourse on competences, which are supported by the developments of language sciences. The text also addresses the advent of a new paradigm on contemporary reading and writing called "Nuevos Estudios de Cultura Escrita" (New Literacy Studies), which questioned the foundations of the assumptions that had been dominating the teaching of language in Colombia with new epistemology on contemporary written culture.