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Abstract: This article considers issues underlying the development of the linguistic persona of a student as part of the space of a higher educational establishment. The purpose of the article is the description of the potential and the role of topic-specific courses of foreign language teaching in the formation of a secondary linguistic persona and difficulties arising as a result of real situations of communication in a multitude of discourses. The authors refer to methods of analysis of prescriptive documents regulating the process of education considering foreign languages (Federal Educational Standard), methods of modeling and analytical methods used to process the results of education and students’ performance. The authors argue that individuals with a well-developed linguistic persona demonstrate sufficient linguistic, cultural, and professional skills and are capable of partaking in sociocultural discourse. It is an indispensable factor conditioning the success of students’ general performance in realising their skills as part of their linguistic course and a real situation of communication. The authors demonstrate that referring to the course of Speaking and Writing Practice, sharing their own experience of teaching foreign languages (namely, English) to students of the third and fourth years of studies (major code 45.02.01 Philology) in order to describe factors conditioning the successful development of a linguistic persona. The authors conclude that texts used in the aforementioned course improve students’ overall professional performance, help them enlarge their vocabulary, build a considerably better mastery of speech, and facilitate the development of their linguistic competence. The latter is understood by the authors as a meta-disciplinary category which does not only include the ability to communicate in one’s own mother tongue and in a foreign language but also the ability to recognise and analyse different phenomena of a wider context which helps form a level of linguistic competence comparable to that of a native speaker. The authors conclude that perfecting professional and general cultural skills and improving overall knowledge ability may contribute to a faster and more effective achievement of proficiency in the student’s chosen foreign language which, in its turn, will lead to them becoming a well-formed linguistic persona.