To prove successful, language teaching requires a great deal of students’ participation in the process. However, students’ attention, a pre-requisite for such participation, tends to gradually wane as the lesson proceeds – a phenomenon that becomes yet more marked at lectures due to these not requiring listeners’ active involvement.The paper focuses on the means and techniques of keeping students attentive at ESP lectures (whose primary purpose is to acquaint them with IT-related vocabulary and advanced grammar structures) such as message encryption and decryption, use of metaphors, deviation from the expected, incorporation of grammar in the relevant socio-cultural context, etc.