Verb conjugation of "esaudire" in Italian

The third and forth largest economies in the world are growing due to the fact that the countries were investing large resources in education, including foreign language acquisition. English, in this case, was the dominant language.
In the attachment you will find the reviewed documents. Your Portuguese is quite good. I understood everything. If you write the same text in German, I can know what you wanted to say.
What is the past tense of 'to swim'? So either you say, I was swimming or yesterday I was swimming. Or: I was running yesterday vs. yesterday, I ran. You know the answer? I have no clue.