Аннотация:The experience of distance learning has shown that language teaching, developed for a full-time learning
format, needs to be aligned. In this regard, it seems necessary to come up with new ways to foster
educational process, new approaches, programs and materials that support distance learning. The paper
discusses the experience of creating and piloting a new distance communicative course entitled “Our
Moscow Neighbors” and describes its features, teaching methods and teaching materials. Those
constraints resulting from distance learning and hampering teachers’ ability to support a unified learning
environment are overcome by an innovative approach proposed by the authors of the project “Our
Moscow Neighbors”. The approach constantly encourages students to be engaged in a discourse with
each other, and express different, sometimes opposite points of view on a particular problem. During a
piloting phase, an individual approach that underlay the ways of giving classes within the project, showed
that all students, regardless of their level of language proficiency, took part in general communications
without feeling any inconvenience or embarrassment. Project activities showed that distance learning is
not an obstacle to achieving the wider objective set in language teaching at the present stage, namely,
teaching communication skills and abilities. Besides this, the features of online learning call for a
properly organized learning environment and new ways of giving classes. The project “Our Moscow
Neighbors” offers its own way of addressing these problems.