Genres are products of cultures, reflecting the needs and practices of communities that have created them. Teaching the Polish language to foreigners, we should make them familiar with numerous Polish genres of speech, recommended in programmes of teaching Polish as a foreign language. The cover letter is a relatively new genre in the Polish continuum of speech, adopted from the Anglo-Saxon culture after the transition in 1989. It is a complex genre, deriving from others, such as the official letter, application, advertisement letter, and CV. The article presents a description of the genre, according to the genre pattern by Maria Wojtak, including four aspects: structural, pragmatic, ontological and linguistic. The dynamics of the genre resulted in the creation of a canon model, alternative variants and adaptive variants of this type of letter. The definition of the cover letter in terms of genre studies states that it is a short text (maximum one page) with a strictly defined structure, aiming at making the recipient (potential employer) hire the sender, it shows the sphere of life related to the world of labour and education, and is usually expressed in a schematic and clichéd manner (usage patterns are often copies of normative patterns). Foreigners should learn all four aspects of description of this genre of speech for effective communication in the environment of the Polish language and culture.