Academic Writing with Italian freshman students of German as a Foreign Language – Feasible Steps to Critical Thinking? The objective of this study is to investigate how students react when they are confronted with teaching methods, which differ from their own academic traditions. As part of the euroWiss-project (Hamburg – Chemnitz – Bergamo – Modena) Wissenschaftsbildung” there has been started an intervention study: Italian freshman students of German as a Foreign Language have been invited to write papers on linguistic issues and to present their work to their colleagues. Evidently, they had to overcome different difficulties, such as lack of language skills, but also how to write down the newly acquired knowledge in an academic paper by taking a critical view