ESP teaching for learners with professional, academic, and occupational communicative needs must consider the factors that would ensure their students transition to the upper-intermediate and advanced levels in language learning. Developing ESP writing skills and learning complex grammar patterns present difficulties to Russian PhD students due to sociocultural specificity of the two languages. Even where Russian and English possess common characteristics, there are discrepancies that hinder the process of learning. The paper presents contrastive description of 1) the information flow and sentence word order rigidity vs flexibility in the English and Russian languages, and 2) it-clefting. It is proposed that contrastive grammar analysis and subsequent two-way grammar translation can help adopt L2 grammar patterns successfully.