The article discusses the problem of using speech redundancy as a means of determining the level of communicative competence in Russian as a foreign language. In our research, the issue of speech redundancy is considered from the point of view of the speaker and the listener and should be taken into account both during day-to-day communication and while communicating in academic settings. On the one hand, when facts are explained repeatedly, in a detailed way, they lose their informativity. On the other hand, redundancy facilitates a more adequate understanding. The use of the means of redundancy by the speaker enables us to draw a number of conclusions about the level of his or her communicative competency. To do this, we conducted a two stage statistical study. At the first stage, the frequency of the main types of segmental redundancy in students' speech was analyzed. At the second stage, we looked into the language units representing each type of redundancy. We videotaped students' speech during classes after which 50 samples containing 50 redundancy phenomena each were selected. Statistical analysis of the samples was carried out using the method proposed by Golovin and showed that there is a certain correlation between the types and frequency of redundancy means in students' speech and the level of their communicative competency.