The purpose of the article is to suggest an authors’ view on developing a system of exercises for teaching Russian phraseology, taking into account the specifics of foreign students’ cognitive activities. The relevance of the study lies in the idea to optimize the teaching system for the requirements and needs of the modern generation of students. The article highlights the main cognitive characteristics of thinking inherent in students of the Y and Z generations (field independence, impulsivity, high tolerance, low ability to generalize information, reliance on the sensory-perceptual way of perceiving and minimizing information in productive types of speech activity), the exercise system is developed within communicative approach to teaching Russian phraseology to foreigners. During the selection of educational material in order to identify the phraseological units’ frequency in the speech of Russian native speakers, a survey was conducted. Its results showed a change in the quantitative and qualitative indicators of actively used phraseological units in speech. As a method of phraseological units semantization in the proposed system of exercises, the authors use the method of their inner form analysis. The conducted study contributes to the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, and creates the prerequisites for the further development of the methodology of teaching Russian phraseology.