The paper describes the formation of students' skills for the optimal development of monologic discourse in a foreign (Russian) language. The relevance of the work is based on the problems associated with the development of monologic discourse by foreign philology students who have a prior learning experience with the use of traditional teaching methods. The novelty of the study consists in the use of cataphoric means in teaching students monologic speech, where these means can indicate the development vector of actualized discourse. The proposed theoretical model has been verified under the conditions of a psycholinguistic laboratory experiment conducted at the A.S. Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, as well as in other universities.