The current state of the problem of studying and teaching foreign language legal discourse is presented. Various points of view on discourse as an interdisciplinary phenomenon are analyzed. Legal discourse is considered as a kind of institutional discourse. Communication of participants in legal discourse is carried out on the basis of a certain number of rules that govern their role and normative behavior. In their actions, there is coordination inherent in this form of communication and allowing the participants in legal discourse to be perceived as components of a single whole – a larger institutional system. A brief description of the functions of legal discourse is given – prescriptive, informative, argumental, declarative, regulatory, interpretive, cumulative, presentation, strategic and code. Such properties of legal discourse as performativity and intertex-tuality are discussed, and its components are described. The difference between legal texts, in which the discourse of law is implemented, from texts of other specialties is shown. They are created in the legal language as a type of language for special purposes and have intra- and exter-nal-text specificity. Legal texts, in spite of their genre variety, have a predominantly standard for-mat. Such types of legal text as court decisions and regulations, powers of attorney and contracts, wills, etc., have a specific construction plan, are divided into parts in a certain way and are drawn up graphically. Discursive analysis is considered as the most acceptable method of studying and teaching a foreign language of law.

The research objective includes identifying the role of verbal cognitive activity when forming linguistic students’ compensatory and pragmatic competences. The article analyses correlation of linguistic competences and speech activity (language usage) from the viewpoint of foreign language teaching. Specificity of the competences manifestation depending on a type of thinking is revealed. Scientific originality of the research involves justifying the thesis that students’ verbal cognitive activity stimulation allows simultaneous development of their pragmatic and compensatory competences taking into account similarity of intellectual models. The authors introduce a definition of verbal cognitive activity and reveal the educational potential of the case-study method. The research findings are as follows: the authors identify the stages of verbal cognitive activity development with a focus on forming students’ compensatory and pragmatic competences on the basis of the case-study technology.

The study aims to prove that there are advantages of using discourse analysis in teaching a professional foreign language to law students. The article examines in great detail a comprehensive approach to teaching the United States legal discourse to foreign students, developed by C. Hoffman and implemented at Georgetown University. The authors propose content of the legal English course for the Russian law students of senior years and describe the steps necessary to organise a class session with discourse analysis involvement. Scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying advantage of using discourse analysis in legal English acquisition. As a result of the research, it is proved that through the use of discourse analysis, students get an opportunity to familiarise with specificities of a foreign legal system and a target language itself in the context of the presented sample of legal discourse.

We substantiate the need for the foreign language grammatical competence formation among high school students. We consider personal, meta-subject, subject results of mastering the main educational program “Foreign Language”, reflected in the Federal State Educational Standard of Secondary General Education, the European system of levels of foreign language proficiency. Based on the fact that the result of mastering the basic course of a foreign language is the achievement of a threshold level of proficiency in a foreign language, the main criteria (the speed of individual operations, the number of grammatical constructions used, variability, accuracy) and the levels of formation of foreign language grammatical competence among high school students were determined. We focus on a complex of grammar exercises and tasks aimed at the reproduction, combined with the substitution; the expansion of a speech sample, the transformation and the combination. The topic “Conditional sentences” was chosen for a more accurate description of the complex of exercises and tasks. It is one of the most difficult grammatical topics proposed for study at school. We prove that methodically competently organized work on the foreign language grammatical competence formation among high school students makes the process of teaching foreign language effective and creative.

Importance. Nowadays most interactions with texts take place on the Internet. Because of this, it is required to implement the properties of hypertextuality for education materials creation in order to develop relevant reading skills. The purpose of the study is to integrate hypertextuality into the process of forming reading competence. Materials and methods. A comparative analysis of the reading organization theories was used to identify a universal list of strategies. The synthesis of empirical data obtained as a result of studying the functional properties of hypertexts contributed to determining the specifics of this educational material in the context of foreign language teaching methods. Results and Discussion. The composition of the foreign language reading competence was determined and studied. It consists of three components: motivational, cognitive and practical. The components define the requirements for the properties of the text, among which is a structural diversity used to provoke the implementation of various reading strategies required to perform communicative tasks. S.K. Folomkina’s classification was used as a universal typology of reading types. It was found that interaction with hypertext is more of a research strategy which combines skimming with the other three types of reading. Conclusion. The proposed model of interaction with hypertext, divided into four stages, makes it possible to effectively implement all components of a foreign language reading competence: motivational due to the interactivity of hypertext, predisposing to the autonomy of research; cognitive due to the authenticity and potential infinity of educational materials presented by hypertext; practical due to the creation of conditions for the integrated use of all types of reading.