Communicative language teaching is perhaps the most popular approach to foreign languages. It usually prioritizes fluency over accuracy and it is therefore vital to obtain and design study materials which will closely resemble real life communicative situations. A spoken speech corpus could be an excellent source of this kind of materials, and the article speculates on the benefits that a corpus-based approach may bring to teaching Russian as a foreign language. As an example, the author uses the corpus of authentic spontaneous Russian spoken speech (One Speaker’s Day) which has been created in St. Petersburg, with the writer’s contribution. The article briefly outlines the history of creation and the main features of the spoken speech corpus, and then regards some possible implementations of the corpus data in a classroom. The author focuses on several phonetical, lexical, sociolinguistic, discursive and communicative characteristics of the data assembled and annotated in the corpus. Since the data exists in both audiorecording and transcribed texts, it can provide an invaluable foundation for fluency practice activities in a foreign classroom, with some examples suggested in the article.