Professional development is an important part of teachers' professional lives. It involves improvement of individual skills, personal performance, chances of obtaining a good job, and career advancement. The article reports on teacher professional development of English language teachers. It, first, explains the need for teacher training seminars and an increased demand for new IELTS exam teaching skills based on a study conducted by the author; then it outlines standards for English teachers and, finally, it looks at various areas of teacher development at the tertiary level, such as teaching portfolio, collaboration, teacher study groups, workshops, and research seminars. Findings reveal that teachers lack experience of teaching for IELTS and its assessment; they have also difficulties in teaching academic style to students and explaining the text structure for two IELTS essays; the format of the speaking part is also a problem with several teachers. These results indicate that there is a need for teacher training seminars as the first step in teacher development and a demand for continuous professional development in a particular university context.

Discourse is the way that language -either spoken or written -is used for communicative effect in a real-world situation. Thornbury considers the text as the product and the discourse -as a communicative process that involves 'language and the record of the language that is used in this discourse, which is 'text'. Although presentations are generally categorized as spoken text types, an academic presentation is a compromise between spoken and written text types: on the one hand, it is given in a classroom as an oral text; on the other hand, it is thoroughly prepared as a home assignment in the form of a written text. This article focuses on the analysis of such linguistic features of students' presentations as cohesion, coherence, and prosody. For this analysis, data were collected from 60 2 nd year students of the International College of Economics and Finance (ICEF) presentations on various economic topics which were recorded and examined (the time limit for each of the presentations was 10 minutes); out of 60, 10 presentation texts were selected for auditory analysis, and thematic centers (TCs) were examined using acoustic analysis. Measurements of prosodic parameters such as pitch, intensity, and duration (rate of utterance) were obtained using the computer programs Speech Analyzer 3.0. 1 and Praat (v.4.0.53). The results of these analyses show that students' presentations are cohesive, coherent and contain TCs, which are characterized by specific prosodic parameters that have a certain effect on the comprehension of these texts, their expressiveness and pragmatic value.

Any teacher, beginner or experienced, wants to teach an effective and successful lesson. The notion of effective teaching is rather difficult: two teachers can teach the same lesson, but differently, and both lessons can be effective. This article deals with some principles which can make a lesson effective, such as lesson management, lesson structure, students’ motivation to study, and class size. This research into students’ attitude to class size covers four groups from academic year 2016-2017 (faculty of linguistics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics – NRU HSE), six groups from academic year 2017-2018 (faculty of linguistics), and four groups from academic year 2017-2018 (International College of Economics and Finance – ICEF). Students’ replies to the question of whether they like to study in large or small groups show that most students prefer to study in small groups; the standard number of students in a first-year class is 15, but in reality can exceed 20.

'Collaborative teacher development is an increasingly common kind of teacher development found in a wide range of language teaching contexts'. Teachers can collaborate with other teachers in writing materials, books, doing research, and analysing observed lessons. Even the format and the content of a teaching journal can be developed in cooperation with other colleagues. The article reports on collaborative teacher development of English language teachers at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in Moscow, Russia. The study used a survey to investigate needs for teacher development at NRU HSE. Findings reveal that not all teachers practise self-observation; many teachers believe that feedback must be personal; the majority of teachers find peer observation subjective; almost all teachers have teaching journals but their understanding of what a teaching journal is seems to be erroneous. These results indicate that without a clear understanding of the listed above issues and their implementation in a given context professional development can hardly be possible. The author analyses the results of this research and makes suggestions about teacher development as a continuous and collaborative process.

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