Teaching a foreign language at a university presents a particular challenge for teachers and methodologists: how to combine a foreign language, especially a second one, with the future professional activities of students. The purpose of this paper is to offer the most effective practical project-based tasks for teaching a second foreign language. An experiment over four academic years within the subject “Second Foreign Language” in the field “Tourism” at the Financial University (Moscow) with 180 undergraduates proved that the project-based assignments could be adjusted for different levels of students' training and used for teaching a second foreign language and the main one.

The article states the problem of preparing students for cross-cultural communication by some means of initiatives. The authors provide a detailed series of definitions and determine the necessity to consider regional specificities during the development of initiatives aimed at improving the students’ cross-cultural communication skills. Thus the following main prospects outline the design of the initiatives: the examination of the quantitative and qualitative analysis, which will enable to identify the students’ preparedness for the project; the review of research works and analytical data reflecting the role and importance of initiatives; the analysis of the mechanisms for initiatives’ implementation, one of which is a professional task. The main results are the determination of the value foundations of the mechanisms for students’ preparation, justification for the selection of the region taken for comparison and analysis, the experience of which is adapted to the conditions of the local region, consolidation of the main areas of students’ cross-cultural training implemented within the project framework, and the design of a predictive model of the initiative. Systematic and structural-functional approaches are used to fulfill the goal set (to expand the right understanding of the prospects for the design of initiatives during the development of cross-cultural communication).