English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a teaching strategy which aims to meet the specific communicative needs of language learners. From the perspective of linguistic analysis, ESP focuses on language use in specialist discourse communities to which prospective language users belong. The genre-analytic approach, with its power to clarify the communicative purposes and linguistic features of genre texts, supports the characteristic feature of specificity in ESP. This paper reviews the three main focuses of genre-analytic research in ESP literature: 1) generic integrity and linguistic features, 2) generic resources, functional variation and cultural contexts, and 3) genre sets, interdiscursivity and critical genre analysis. The analysis indicates that the genre approach is not limited to move analysis as is generally understood, and that the genre-analytic approach in ESP has now become a cross-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, multi-perspective and critical analysis of discourse. The paper also illuminates how the genre-analytic approach has provided strong empirical support for the development of theory and practice in ESP.