This article aims at defining linguo cultural peculiarities of the "student" role as part of university teachers' professional identity. The research is based on the Russian and English languages. The key claim of the research is that lexical unit DIFFERENT / CHANGING serves as a discursive marker of role transformations in education and the collocation STUDENTS [] DIFFERENT / CHANGING gets the status of a stable media topic in non-institutional pedagogical discourse. This makes the application of decoding stylistic procedures justifiable. Materials selected for our analysis comprise 100 contexts for each languagemostly interviews, blogs and comments. The article studies the linguistic means of rendering the following constituents of the student role-model: temporal positioning of the role-norm 'student', controlled/uncontrolled character of the change, interconnection of the role-model change with other professional identity constituents, evaluative contamination of the marker DIFFERENT / CHANGING through its close context and the degree the observer is alienated to the process (or feels part of it).