The article is devoted to the description of the study, the objective of which is to determine the level of adequacy of understandding and use of the repertoire of utterances with the meaning of a request by foreign students. Based on the results of the research, the possible zones of intercultural interference arising from the semantic decoding of requests by foreign students are revealed. The repertoire of speech moves is also determined, which should be the subject of special attention at the classes in Russian as a foreign language.