The study aims to substantiate the possibility of forming phonological, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic components of metalinguistic activity in younger schoolchildren with a severe speech impairment based on the author’s speech therapy programme. The paper analyses the essence of the notion of “metalinguistic activity”, determines the structure of metalinguistic activity, analyses and presents the results of a learning experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed author’s programme for teaching Russian to schoolchildren with a severe speech impairment. Scientific novelty of the study lies in defining the structure of metalinguistic activity, which includes: the subject, which is the language system; the method, which is cognitive operations; the product, which is knowledge of language and the ability to operate with it; and the result, which is readiness for conscious text perception and text generation. As a result, the author’s programme for younger schoolchildren with a severe speech impairment has been developed and tested in order to form phonological, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic components of metalinguistic activity in Russian language teaching; the principles of teaching younger schoolchildren with a severe speech impairment when organising speech therapy have been formulated.