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Abstract: The article substantiates the necessity to develop students’ intercultural communicative competence and analyzes the corresponding advantages of classes in the form of intercultural on-line interaction. The paper also investigates factors which might influence effectiveness of the educational process based on intercultural interaction. The results of an empirical study are introduced. The study under discussion is aimed at verifying the hypothesis about the influence of speech characteristics of the speaker of Russian on the English speaker’s willingness to maintain conversation. The research method chosen is content analysis. Thirteen listings of thematic chats involving Russian and American students participating in the “Global Understanding” course have been analyzed. The results of the content analysis allow the researcher to distinguish Russian communicants’ speech characteristics such as prevalence of language and grammar mistakes, a relatively high coefficient of vocabulary potential (0,77), use of complex sentences in written speech (on average 3 sentences out of 10). Significant correlations between the number of mistakes, indicators of lexical richness and lexical scarcity of Russian communicants and indicators of willingness to maintain conversation of American communicants have been discovered. Language and speech mistakes as well as the quantity of words in utterances of micro themes have the biggest number of correlations with the indicators of willingness to maintain conversation. In order to distinguish speech characteristics which influence the willingness to maintain conversation a multivariate analysis ANOVA was carried out. Two factors that significantly influence the willingness to maintain conversation have been singled out: the number of grammar mistakes and the number of words in Russian students’ utterances. The first factor decreases the willingness to maintain conversation, whereas the second one increases such willingness. The results achieved allowed the authors to formulate recommendations on how to make intercultural written on-line communication effective for students.