In today's multi-ethnic world, one of the most important problems is the development of future teachers’ communicative competence, cultural|gracious| pluralism, plurilingualism and tolerance. It is important to enrich individual person’s experience of language in its cultural contexts.

This issue is related to such an important task as the activization of students’ speaking in foreign language classes. There is interesting experience of teaching speaking in French and English at universities in Odessa region. We offer the students the following system of creative tasks : representative (involve retelling the course of events, description of the characters); analytical (direct students to analyze the actions and behaviour of heroes of short stories, to compare the characters); hypothetical (guide students how to express their viewpoints on the factors that have influenced the nature of the character, his or her deeds). In addition to creative tasks the linguistic exercises are offered to the future teachers. These tasks have been developed in the process of studying the stories of Guy de Maupassant ( « La Parure », « Deux amis », « Le Papa de Simon », « Sur l’eau », « Clair de lune »), O. Henry (« The Last Leaf», « The Gift of the Magi »), John Galsworthy ( « Acme », « The First and the Last »).