Scientific Supervisor's Review of  Ksenia Popova's  Master's thesis «ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN GESTURES IN THEIR CONTRASTIVE COMPARISON  AS ILLUSTRATED BY STAND-UP SHOWS»  The graduation thesis of Ksenia Popova is a research paper on English and Russian gestures in their contrastive comparison as illustrated by stand-up shows.  To fulfill this task, basing on the data of British and Russian TV programs, Ksenia Popova collected and looked through 300 hours of video-recordings, wrote out 200 hours thereof and made photos of 90 gestures, which were used by the participants of these programs. As grounding of the research principles Ksenia Popova made a review of some theoretical and practical studies on speech culture and gesture etiquette in English and Russian cultures. Novelty of Ksenia Popova’s research is in the description of some linguistic and extra-linguistic features of stand-up show as a genre. New are also the description and the interpretation of main ways of gesture interaction in British and Russia TV-programs and an attempt to connect them with peculiarities of national speech etiquette. I want to underline, that Ksenia Popova’s research work has important theoretical and practical value, as the results of the research may widen our understanding about gestures use and make data available for textbooks on speech culture and gesture etiquette. Master's thesis of Ksenia Popova is a multilevel research, since apart from collection and analysis of video-data she made an independent sociolinguistic research of peculiarities of perception of gestures by representatives of Russian and British cultures. To my opinion, the research thesis of Ksenia Popova, both theoretically and practically, is in line with all Master’s thesis requirements and deserves a high grade.   Scientific Supervisor Candidate of Philology Associate Professor Ilya S. Nikolaev