Аннотация:Despite the global prevalence of teaching English to children aged three to seven, there remains a paucity of research examining the teacher training necessary for the job. Paying particular attention to preschool language education being a separate stage of language learning, the current article investigates the state of affairs at Russian universities offering undergraduate degrees in language teaching with a view to juxtaposing them with the requirements found in legal documents regulating teacher training in Russia, thus facilitating the need for advancing pre-service teachers’ knowledge and skills of communicating with preschoolers in an English-language classroom. Furthermore, the article offers a classification of specific communicative tasks typical of an English lesson with preschoolers, and includes task formats instrumental in the development of the necessary knowledge and skills, the experimental application of which may contribute to larger gains in the ensuing research of the professional communicative competence indispensable for teaching very young learners.