The purpose of the foreign language course for PhD students in engineering universities is to develop foreign language communicative competence, the level of which allows using a foreign language in research activities. In order to improve the quality of the course on the basis of practice-oriented and student-centered approaches there were introduced two changes in the English course. One of the changes concerned participation of PhD students in a conference in English and the second one was their presenting a review article on the foreign-language sources of information showing the state of their dissertation research problem as their final paper. The goal of the research was to evaluate the introduced changes. To achieve the goal the objective examination results of the previous years were compared as well as a survey was conducted to identify the subjective attitude of PhD students to the innovations. The conducted research confirmed that both changes made to the English course in the 2024–25 academic year contributed to improving the quality of foreign language training. On the basis of the research results it is recommended firstly to introduce the organization of the conference and writing a review article in the program of the English course for PhD students and secondly to increase the study time for developing oral speech skills in it.