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The results of a study into communicative failures typical of a foreigner's written speech are presented in this paper. Among numerous barriers hindering the process of communication in a foreign language (in our case the Russian language), those barriers which impede further development of communicative exchange and sometimes render it almost impossible, are of particular interest in this study. The goal of a specialist in teaching methods is developing a technology for the identification of communicative failures in accordance with a certain criterion. The clarification of its character is the purpose of this article. By a communicative failure we intend such a failure, where a communicative act does not perform its function. Written texts in a learned language received as a result of a psycholinguistic experiment were used as language material for the research. During the experiment a corpus of extracted written texts with specification of respondents' gender, age, and social status was gathered. For the purposes of analysis a task implying filling in a questionnaire in a non-mother tongue, which requires quite short and unambiguous answers from a respondent, was chosen. Nevertheless, in some cases, because of substitution of basic information for secondary (clarifying) information the answers could be variously interpreted and, consequently, applied to different communicative situations. On this basis we made the following conclusion: a speech act associated with more than one context provides a high degree of freedom for interpretation of its goal and, hence, allows for different ways of responding to its contents. Just such a speech act can be qualified as a failed act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]