The question under discussion is the methods of teaching different types of English locutions to students. Special attention is paid to the phraseological units, whose meaning is not transparent and cannot be guessed out of the context as it has nothing to do with the literal meanings of constituent words. It is asserted that the full lexical competence necessarily requires the mastery of a certain number of set expressions of the target language. The paper offers a procedure which combines learning the meaning of a locution with its practical use as a means to enhance students’ speech activity. It will undoubtedly facilitate the learners’ communicative competence. After introducing a new phraseological unit, the students give its literal translation, then they go on to discuss what this locution may mean. In the course of the discussion (which will inevitably include the wrong definitions of the phraseological units) the interlocutors will come across the semantic nuances and thus develop the skill of the language analysis and language guessing. At the last stage the learners are asked to recollect the appropriate Russian phraseological unit with the same meaning. The procedure described has been successfully tested in English classes with the students of the Language University.