Urgent problems of teaching methods of scientific research to postgraduate students-linguists

The paper is devoted to the description of the organization and content of the teaching process at the Foreign Language Department, SSUSSE, concerning postgraduate students of Linguistics, namely, the experience of teaching them research activities and methods of fulfilling them. In addition, the authors rely on the experience of prominent scientists and specialists in this sphere. Scientific research activity is one the most important components in masters’ training, as its goal is the development of certain competences, reflected in their graduation qualification paper (master’s thesis). The authors present the stages of scientific research work, including the introduction into the methodology of linguistic research, research practices, writing course papers, master’s thesis, reports for conferences; they note how it is important to use methods of linguistic analysis to make the research valid. The paper characterizes and substantiates both general and specific scientific methods used for research in the sphere of translation and cross-cultural communication (comparative, descriptive, component, discourse analysis, content analysis and others), which are illustrated by the examples of their use in students’ research papers. The authors’ conception is based on the official standards and authoritative sources in the spheres of linguistics, lingua-didactics, and translation study.