Today English is the necessity for almost everyone in Russia in their everyday life. Students want to be well taught so that they could use Eng­lish for work, information, travelling and leisure. To meet these require­ments teachers of  English should improve their skills, select and use mate­rial in an effective way which suits the expectations of their learners. In the following work I’m describing the most essential principles of teaching English which are based on a communicative and learner - centered approach and prove to be motivating in teaching students to communicate in English: 1)   encouraging a friendly, relaxing learning environment (get­ting the lesson off to a good start: warm-up activities establishing a trusting, positive, supportive approach at the lesson); 2)   setting attainable (real) standards for students (taking into consideration varying abilities and levels of motivation and coopera­tion); 3)   not over-correcting students' mistakes (encouraging fluency, using reformulation to respond to the mistake); 4)   personalizing materials and activities (choosing topics and material based on students' own experience, using «open» exercises and open-ended questions, developing learners' abilities with re­spect to their interests); 5)   being flexible and responsive (being ready to adjust the plan of the lessons to the needs, interests, or ideas the students may have at the moment); 6) activating cooperative learning in the classroom (organizing pair and group work, helping each student to make a valid contribu­tion to the final product of the joint work, regardless of their linguistic ability); 7)   using English all the time (using the English language inside and outside the classroom has a great influence on the students' willingness to speak English); 8) using various material (charts, grammar and vocabulary games, pictures, graphs, tables, leaflets, brochures, newspapers, magazines, audio and video courses, etc). And if we follow all these principles, we are sure to achieve good results. Well, I believe, a teacher is a teacher while he is searching, in­venting, creating. He can use any traditional methods of teaching, but, of course, he should apply the method to a concrete group of students or he is welcome to create his own, new system of teach­ing.