The paper is devoted to the problem of improving written communication skills in the university. It is intended to underline the importance of mastering writing skills when teaching a foreign language. Much attention is paid to teaching experience and approaches for students' mastering of the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam. This article is intended to fill the gaps in methodological and pedagogical aspects of teaching description of visual information materials in English. The authors worked out and implemented a new training workshop which is aimed at teaching and practicing graph description of visual information. Based on the curriculum a new syllabus has been drafted that provides further distribution of thematic, lexical and grammatical material given the specific nature of graphical material. The authors propose a two-stage teaching approach and methodological algorithm about how to work out exam strategies and form the required exam competences. The article highlights the outcomes and the challenges that are likely to arise when implementing the approach suggested by the authors. The proposed methodology can be used as a part of general foreign language training.

The article concerns the research of modern Russian regional politicians' speech portraits.

The article concerns the research of functional and linguistic peculiarities of religious discourse in different historical periods. The author considers the religious discourse as a method, consistently reproduced in time and space, of transmitting the complex of meanings of a sacral text with account of the mentality, religious experience and objective reality of people speaking a certain language in a certain phase of history. The contrastive analysis of polyglot sacral texts appearing as a significant part of religious discourse and being a subject of rendering into different languages is worthwhile only when historical, chronological, sociocultural and situative factors which have an impact on the meaning of a sacral text are taken into consideration. Since translators were expected to observe the compulsory rules of rendering the meaning and structure of the source text, translations appeared that distorted the text meaning or did not reproduce it accurately.

The article concerns the research of functional peculiarities of multilingual religious discourse in its