Interpersonal and Presentational Communication
This domain tests your ability to interact and to produce connected discourse in Russian: short exchanges, messages, emails, opinion essays, and spoken presentations. Scoring focuses on task completion, comprehensibility, vocabulary, grammar, and register. Control of register and discourse organization often separates strong responses from merely accurate ones.
Register and address
- Use ты with friends, peers, and children; use вы with strangers, elders, officials, and most professional contacts. Keep the choice consistent; switching mid-message reads as rudeness or carelessness.
- Formal letters use Уважаемый/Уважаемая plus first name and patronymic; capitalize Вы in correspondence; close with С уважением and your name.
- Politeness: "Не могли бы вы...?" and "Можно...?" soften requests. Imperfective imperatives (Проходите, садитесь) sound welcoming; perfective imperatives (Откройте, пожалуйста) make a specific request.
Building a response
- Use a clear frame: greeting, purpose, body with connectors (во-первых, кроме того, однако, таким образом), closing.
- In narration, imperfective sets the scene and perfective advances events: "Я читал книгу, когда позвонил друг."
- Avoid English calques: "Я имею машину" is un-Russian for possession; use "У меня есть машина."
Worked example: Write a formal email asking a professor for an extension. Model opening: "Уважаемый Иван Петрович! Я пишу, чтобы попросить Вас продлить срок сдачи работы." Reasoning: the patronymic is required in formal Russian; Вы is capitalized; попросить plus infinitive is natural; продлить is perfective because the result - a new deadline - is the point. A bare "Я хочу..." would be too blunt.
Traps
- Using ты with an instructor or examiner.
- Omitting the patronymic in formal address.
- Mixing aspects in past narration so the timeline becomes unclear.
- Relying on one connector instead of varied cohesive devices.