The article deals with the problem of using active methods of teaching on the example of case study. The notion of active methods of teaching, the description of case study, stages of preparing case studies are given in the paper. The article contains several case studies on business English. Case studies are stories. They present realistic, complex, and contextually rich situations and often involve a dilemma, conflict, or problem that one or more of the characters in the case must negotiate. The peculiarity of active methods of teaching is that it develops practical and critical thinking. This helps the students not only to memorize and render the material which was given by the teacher but involves them in the process of active thinking and practice. Case studies give students practice identifying the parameters of a problem, recognizing and articulating positions, evaluating courses of action, and arguing different points of view

The article focuses on the transformations, which occur in Russian and Armenian translations of culture-bound constituents in W. Saroyan’s fiction with special reference to the analysis of their pragmatic value and both cross-cultural and cross-language identification. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the so-called Saroyanesque identity and the translation perspectives of his specific manner of reproducing the actual reality, his personal vision of the world he lived in and created in, the world which combined the environment, circumstances, conditions, characters, cultures, ethnicity of two different communities – his native Armenian and no less native America. The so-called double-sided transformations of culture-bound constituents occur in W. Saroyan’s fiction at basically two levels: the cognitive level of ethnic and mental indicators transformations and the linguistic level of culture-bound elements translation (words, phrases, exclamations etc.). To keep Saroyanesque identity the translators should primarily transform the ideas, the concepts, the ethnic mentality of the characters, then the language media should undergo certain pragmatic modification to be correctly interpreted by the target audience.

Pre-translation text analysis is an integral part of an efficient translation procedure. In fact, it focuses on collecting intra-textual and extra-textual information on the text under translation. Collecting the intra-textual information is mainly based on a thorough analysis of the source text linguistic peculiarities, whereas the extra-textual information focuses basically on the communicative functional properties of both source and target texts. There exist different approaches towards this procedure and the stages of its accomplishment. Nonetheless, it should be noted that they all lead to a broader spectrum of discourse analysis with its intra-textual and extra-textual parameters and give birth to the translation-oriented pragmatic analysis before initiating translation process itself. The article focuses on the interrelation and interaction of all the mentioned types of analysis (pragmatic analysis, discourse analysis, pre-translation analysis) as an essential requirement for a relevant translation.

The present article considers such text categories as integrity and coherence. The latter is expressed by two different terms in English – cohesion and coherence. There are different approaches towards these two terms, which, however, lead to nearly the same conclusion. The former (integrity) is a means of combining intertextual units while the latter (coherence) is the category ensuring the unity of the text and establishing a link between both intertextual and extra-textual situations and environments. Integrity in its turn, is viewed as a means of integrating text elements into a whole and helping to create an intertextual and extratextual context that is closely related to the category of coherence.

The article attempts to consider text interpretation process in the light of two phenomena that come to describe speech acts – intention and convention. Though both are of importance in terms of text interpretation, they take different positions in case of a national and non-national reader.