Аннотация:The article is aimed at demonstrating the importance of the concept of raising language consciousness in teaching English to Russian learners. The research is based on the material of modal verbs the use of which becomes a stumbling block for Russian learners as they are not conscious of the fundamental differences between the systems of expressing modality in Russian and in English. An attempt is made to show what advantages can the theory of step-by-step formation of mental actions offer to learners when applied to the process of acquiring a foreign language. In teaching authentic English it would be natural to turn to textbooks and manuals written by native speakers and specially meant for foreign learners. At present there are a lot of textbooks of that kind which are widely used for teaching English to Russian students. These textbooks are usually of very good quality, being written by highly skilled educationalists and experts in the field of methods of teaching. However, in our opinion, the trouble is that all these textbooks have a number of drawbacks. First of all, they are meant for hours and hours of work, both in classroom and at home – which is not the case for most Russian schools and universities. Still more important, these teaching manuals are meant for foreigners at large, without focusing on the peculiar characteristics of the learners’ native language. They can be taken up by people from Japan, Poland or Italy, and the result would presumably be the same. This means that they present genuine English material, without any reference to the learners' mother tongue. But it is a well-established fact both in psychology and in linguistics that "thinking is cast in the moulds of the mother tongue". Most people who have had any experience of studying foreign languages tend to agree that the most difficult thing about learning a foreign language is acquiring or assimilating ways of thinking which are quite natural for native speakers of a foreign language but are alien to our own one. That is why in teaching English we have to consistently refer to the Russian language, bringing out similarities and dissimilarities between the two. This can help counteract the effects of interference of students' mother tongue and make it easier for them to concentrate on lexical and grammatical items which tend to challenge Russian speakers.