Communicative competence is increasingly in demand in the workplace. If you aren´t able to communicate in a competent manner, you risk not being given the responsibilities you want or perhaps not even finding employment in the first place. This entails a great responsibility on part of the university to ensure that the students are equipped with adequate communication skills for their professional life. The project, Communication towards profession, aimed to identify in which way oral communicative performance in individual courses corresponds to the communicative competence that is required in professional life. The overarching research question central to the project is: Which possibilities are students given to change their ethos during their education? The main focus of my project is on Nursing science programme. I particularly investigate communication patterns in nurse trainees. Nursing has become science in 1993 in the Swedish higher education system. This means that national targets are formulated in the governing documents. Based on The Higher Education Ordinance formulations, training can be arranged in different ways at different universities. These formulations trickle or seep down into other documents through reformulations and concretisations. All these documents are intended to support the students in their understanding of literacies nexus in higher education. On this poster, I will summarize two analyzes: textual analysis of policy documents on different levels, and interviews with faculty in nursing education. The results of the analyzes indicate that there are difficulties to concretize and verbalize what in support of the oral language consists. My point of departure is in socio-culturally oriented research on academic language. For this investigation, however, I also use rhetorical-oriented approach.