Work with linguistically gifted students during foreign language course at non-language university

The article describes the individual work with the linguistically gifted first year students that are philologists while studying a foreign language at Elabuga Institute of Kazan Federal University. It provides the educational aims, stages of work with gifted students. The results of teacher-student cooperative work in linguistic analysis of O. Henry's short story “The Count and the Wedding Guest” was presented. The main compositional elements of a story (exposition, starting point, rising action, climax, denouement) as well as the main stylistic devices used by the author with their definitions, proved by the examples from the original English text and its Russian translation have been included into the content. Some interpretation helping to understand sociological and psychological aspects of the story can be found.