The article deals with ethnic and individual psycholinguistic features of students which should be taken into account when mastering sociolinguistic and pragmatic components of foreign language communicative competence. Multicomponent foreign language communicative competence implies successful intercultural speech interaction and mutual understanding, "the ability to act as a secondary linguistic personality in a variety of social situations". Attention to sociolinguistic (ability to take into account social and cultural communication norms) and pragmatic (knowledge of linguistic means) components is due to the specific process of mastering these competences which is characterized by intercultural sensitivity, knowledge of linguistic codes for different social situations, consideration of values, psychological and social identities of communication partners. On the basis of the survey of foreign students, conclusions were drawn about sociolinguistic and pragmatic components mastered by representatives of low-context cultures. The paper attempts to describe ethnopsycholinguistic factors which influence the success of acquiring sociolinguistic and pragmatic components of foreign language communicative competence as a basis for successful communicative and behavioral intercultural interaction. The article suggests methodological recommendations and tasks which contribute to formation of these components, allow the learner to think as representative of the culture of the learned language, i.e. to form a secondary language personality (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy