Important components of communicative competence are the skills of selecting communicatively relevant language means: skills of analyzing a communicative situation, assessing the semantic potential of a word, determining the composition of the semantic valences of a language unit, as well as reflecting on the effectiveness of the implemented utterance and self-editing in case of incorrect or inaccurate speech use. The influence of a multicommunicative sociocultural environment, the transfer of weak speech self-regulation from the experience of interaction in their native language, insufficient methodological attention to the development of the above skills within the framework of teaching Russian as a foreign language leads to significant difficulties for foreign students in determining appropriate language units, which is reflected in numerous lexicons-semantic, lexical-grammatical, lexical-stylistic violations. This necessitates the development of methodological tools that can eliminate or prevent student errors. In this article, we identify the components of the ability to appropriately use speech means, and also analyze the oral statements of foreign students (basic level of proficiency in the Russian test) in order to determine the types and mechanisms of errors associated with the choice of communicatively relevant language units. Based on the results of the analysis, directions for corrective and developmental work are proposed, as well as examples of exercises aimed at developing the lexical and semantic competencies of foreign students are given.