The content of grammar taught at foreign language classes should be revised in the light of the psychological theory of forming mental actions and conceptions in the learner. To assimilate the structure of a sentence the learners must have a sum of characteristic features revealing specific regularities of constructing sentences in the foreign language. In teaching sentence patterns their structural, functional and semantic characteristics are taken into consideration. The sentence pattern with the introductory there is analysed to illustrate the problems of teaching syntactical structures from the view-point of content of teaching.