The article considers the issue of changing the function and the plan of expression of grammatical exercises as a special case of changing the content of teaching Russian as a foreign language at the present stage of teaching. The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the possibilities of modifying traditional grammatical exercises in teaching Russian as a foreign language at the A2-B1 language proficiency level. The author uses general scientific methods and methods of empirical research. The results of the study are expressed in the creation of a series of multifunctional grammatical exercises that can be used to teach speaking and writing. The author comes to the conclusion that with the aspect-complex principle of working with grammatical material, grammatical exercises become multifunctional with a communicatively formulated task and changes in the plan of expression of exercises due to the situational way of their organization.