based on halliday's systemic-functional linguistics and genre theory, a linguistic and communicative study of sixty-three models of nursing care plans was carried out. the study included the analysis of the mode, the field, and the tenor of discourse as well as the three metafunctions of language: the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual. three fundamental stages of text development were found ad well as the principal regularities at clause level for this type of text. the findings constitute a step forward in the scientific knowledge of language in the medical sciences regardless of a positive influence in the teaching of english as a foreign language in higher medical education.
