It is widely acknowledged today that the development of specialized linguistic competence goes far beyond memorizing lists of words and grammar points, however 'technical' they might be. Rather, such linguistic competence calls upon a wide variety of knowledge structures including lexico-grammatical knowledge of course, but also discursive, rhetorical, strategical, situational and sociological. In order to become a linguistically competent professional, whether it be in English, Spanish, German, etc., learners must be able to develop all these domains of competence. This is the goal of the communicative approach described here, called 'directed communicative modelling', which uses a genre approach to teaching LSP.