Research on teacher cognition has made use of theories and concepts from different areas, such as cognitive psychology, social psychology and anthropology of knowledge, in order to understand the heterogeneity and complexity of the network of cognitive structures that make up the body of teaching knowledge and regulate professional behavior. Several works (Shavelson and Stern, 1981; Clark and Peterson, 1986; Calderhead, 1996; Cambra Giné and Palou, 2007; Palou and Fons 2014) argue that the decisions teachers make and the actions they take are based on cognitive systems shaped from implicit theories, conceptions, intuitions, images, worldviews, beliefs or representations. As for Language and Literature teachers, social representations about spoken and written language, personal experiences with literature and the trajectory as learners significantly influence the creation of personal teaching models. Munita (2013) argues in this regard that the type of approach that the person has had with literature in everyday life creates conceptions of reading that will directly influence classroom reading practices. Taking into account the multi-referential nature of teaching knowledge leads us to a critical reflection of the initial and continuous training models that focus on learning didactic concepts and teaching techniques that arise from the scientific activity of the disciplinary field. In this paper we propose to address this issue in the teaching practices of initial training. From an ethnographic perspective, we are interested in knowing what are the reference knowledge of the practitioners of the teaching profession in Letters and the place of implicit theories or sociocultural knowledge in the process of practices. We analyze the traces of knowledges (Leleu-Merviel, 2013) in the conjectural scripts and self-records (Bombini, 2012, 2018) of five students of the professorship in Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Through the analysis of discourse in interaction (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005) and the hermeneutic analysis of action (Ricoeur, 1988, 2000) we set out to identify the types of knowledge that serve as a reference in didactic decision-making. The results of the analysis allowed us to observe that most of the decisions that practitioners make before and during classes are guided by knowledge coming from their experiences as students, both at the secondary and university levels, from the formal and non-formal reading and writing practices to which they are accustomed, and from sociocultural representations of the students. The pedagogical knowledge assimilated in initial training is influenced by implicit theories, thus constructing frames of reference that are distanced from official theories.