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Abstract: Text is the basic unit of teaching foreign languages, and intertextuality, which is an essential property of a text, plays an important role in this process. Intertextuality influences the student's comprehension of a foreign language and affects the cultural aspect of communication. The presented article studies intertextuality in the context of teaching Russian as a foreign language (TRAFL). The theory of intertextuality is connected with the methods of TRAFL and is actually a kind of TRAFL which is closely connected with the Russian culture. In recent years the number of students studying Russian abroad has increased, but at the same time there are a lot of problems. The article offers a detailed survey of urgent problems of TRAFL in China by the example of work with Chinese students. In order to solve these problems it is necessary to pay attention to the intertextuality of the studied language, to recreate the foreign cultural background, which could stimulate the development of the lerners’ abilities. And it is very important to try to avoid the interference of the two languages – the native language and the studied one. For example, Chinese students often speak and write according to the model of Chinese. What is more, they learn the meanings of Russian words without paying due attention to the cultural background. To achieve positive results of TRAFL it is important not to forget about the principle of communicative character of education, and to create conditions which keep the students involved in oral (comprehension and speaking) and written (reading and writing) communication. Intertextuality is especially important in writing in the form of citation, which should be distinguished from plagiarism, because citation helps students learn phraseological units and conversational formulae and then construct correct utterances on the model of the ones that have been cited already.