The methodology for mastering English-language communication involves the consistent familiarization of higher education students with institutional discourse that arises in various areas of professional communication. When mastering the provisions of intercultural communication, special attention is paid to the formation of discursive competence in order to help students reproduce the elements of institutional discourse, know its distinctive features, features of implementation and influence. Different approaches to defining the concept of discourse and its typological features are determined, which may create difficulties when teaching interaction in English. Institutional English-language discourse involves communicating in accordance with the norms of a certain society, using an expanded communicative code. Students must master conventional, culturally conditioned, normative speech forms of English-language interaction, understand the lexical and stylistic features of status roles. Institutional discourse bears the imprint of the normative givenness of certain social relations and communications, which implies the ability to interact intellectually in various situations of status-role speech activity. The specified discourse is consistent with the anthropocentric orientation of modern linguistics, the range of interests of which includes issues that are distinguished by interdisciplinary nature and the use of practical application methods. Such important functions as performative, normative, presentational and password should be designated from the side of the teaching methodology. Of particular importance is the mastery of professional vocabulary, which reflects all the linguistic means of communication of the professional society and ensures the process of interaction between its members in accordance with certain communication parameters. Along with the basic vocabulary, the need to master basic grammatical material in the form of structural models of sentences, most often presented in a certain institutional discourse, is revealed. The communicative-activity direction in teaching English-language institutional discourse to students involves the implementation of project, game, problem-search, and other teaching methods.