The article deals with the problem of improving the professional training of sports coaches and future teachers of physical education in the process of teaching a foreign language at a university. The relevance of this issue is due to the presence of a contradiction between the increased requirements for the foreign language communicative competence of university graduates and not fully defined theoretical and practical ideas of teaching a foreign language as a means of professional development. The authors give examples of active teaching methods and techniques that stimulate the creative aspect of the application of knowledge and skills by students in the process of forming communicative competence.