Review of the international conference “Eleventh Shmelev reading” held at the Institute of Russian Language n. a. V. V. Vinogradov of Academy of Sciences (Moscow) on 23–25 February 2015. The most urgent problems of modern speech genre theory were presented and its “hot spots”. The conference organizers tried to invite the leading scientists from all major centers for the study of speech genres in Russia, and abroad. There were two sections: “Genre diversity of contemporary speech communication” and “Language specifics of modern speech genres”.