The article highlights the features of aims setting process of pre-service primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence development, which is based on the definition of the purposes in accordance with the peculiarities of future professional activity. This process is one of the main educational categories and reflects the features of the educational process and the results of professional training of intending primary school teachers. The paper focuses on the views of Ukrainian and foreign scientists on the types of aims and their functions in the future teachers’ training. This work aimed to outline the features of the aims setting process and to determine the purposes of pre-service primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence development. The process of determining the purposes of education is to form a system of general scientific and special professional knowledge that provides certain skills of intending primary school teachers. It is noted, that the main requirements for formulating the aims of the educational process are: clarity, hierarchy and diagnostics. The competence orientation to general (broad sphere of life), special (narrow sphere of activity) and subject (certain courses) determines three stages of designing the aims of intending primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence formation: establishing strategic (general) aim, concretizing it in tactical purposes and forming operational objectives. Tactical purposes are represented by a set of cognitive, developmental and implementation ones, which are specified by operational objectives. To schematically depict the hierarchy of the aims for the pre-service professionals’ foreign language communicative competence development, the method “Aim Tree” was used, which allows to display the hierarchical structure of the aims by dividing the overall aim (level 1) into subaims (level 2), which in turn are divided into new sub-aims (level 2)