One of the most difficult issues of organizing students’ learning activities in the course of speech skills development is the choice of the optimal type of students’ work for successful foreign language communication. The article analyzes positive and negative aspects of its most common types: pair and group work in a lesson on the formation of speech skills in non-native language environment where students are monolingual. Particular attention is paid to the development of spontaneous, unprepared speech, which is the most expected goal of learning a foreign language for most students. As a result of the analysis, we conclude that it is necessary to prioritize work correctly when choosing the type of educational work: despite the high motivating factor of group project activities (choosing a topical issue for the project, developing team spirit, providing a high degree of independence), this type of educational work fails to create effective conditions for developing target language speech skills. In the educational conditions, where students are monolingual, the communication tool used to solve communicative tasks, as a rule, is the students’ native language. A foreign language is used only to verbalize the final project results, which represent a sample of prepared foreign language speech.