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Abstract: This article is devoted to the problems in the field of teaching the Russian language as a native and as a foreign in the light of the achievements of modern linguistic sciences (psycholinguistics, developmental linguistics, communicative grammar, language pedagogy). The article analyzes the concept of teaching Russian offered by famous Russian philologist F. Buslaev, who offers the technology of material training, that opposes the “dry” formal-logical approach to teaching a language, originating from the method of teaching Latin, to a visual method abstract from the content. Attention is paid to the factors that determine the formation and development of children’s language consciousness (for example, metalinguistic reflection, which leads to conscious use of linguistic sign). The author analyzes the methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language existing in modern linguodidactics and the approaches to determining the necessary and sufficient minimum of grammatical forms for the formation of the grammatical competence of the “user” by the language system. The author suggests the idea of developing an active grammar based on the determination of the initial grammar according to the data of associative dictionaries and psycholinguistic experiments connected with the studies of children's linguistic consciousness. It is assumed that early grammatical forms that make an incomplete paradigm, but are sufficient for the child's initial communication, will be more in demand (and correspondingly relevant) in subsequent periods of the speech development of an individual. His hypothesis is verifies with the help of The Russian Associative Dictionary that presents the language in its “pre-speaking form”. The results of the psycholinguistic experiments conducted by The Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Linguistics of The Russian Academy of Sciences made it possible to create a “model of language consciousness” of a person and to reveal different grammatical forms on the basis of their frequency: from the most frequent in communication to those that are on the periphery of the associative-verbal network. The potential of the associative technologies in teaching languages brings us back to Buslaev’s idea of “living grammar”.