The article, from the standpoint of a system-structural, personality and activity-oriented and communicative-cognitive approaches, considers the problem of creating a system of multifunctional auditory-mental exercises designed for teaching listening comprehension as a means of oral foreign language communication for students to achieve subject, meta-subject and personal educational results. The main research methods are modeling and designing, which allow, firstly, to present a model of a multifunctional auditory-mental exercise for teaching students foreign language listening comprehension and mastering the necessary complex of universal learning actions, and secondly, to design a system of these exercises for learners to achieve the listed educational results in the optimal way. A multifunctional exercise for teaching listening comprehension based on universal learning actions has the following parameters: 1) a three-part goal of teaching subject (auditory-thinking), meta-subject and personal actions; 2) a socio-cultural situation of a certain degree of intellectual difficulty that is significant for schoolchildren, within the framework of which a learning speech-thinking task is solved; 3) operating tools as a combination of auditory-mental actions and the universal learning actions as their basis; 4) material resources, including audio texts of varying degrees of problematicity, learning tasks for them and recommendations; 5) ways of performing auditory-mental and universal learning actions. The system of multifunctional auditory-mental exercises includes, firstly, their types, reflecting the specifics of solving reproductive, search and creative learning speech-thinking tasks. The second level of the system is represented by the modes of multifunctional exercises, the selection of which is based on the stages of teaching foreign language listening comprehension, namely: the formation of habits, their improvement, the development of skills and the functioning of communication. At the third level, there are variants of multifunctional exercises, which involve performing the necessary actions under the guidance of a teacher, following only the instructions of the recommendations or independently. All multifunctional auditory-mental exercises are performed by students with the help of an adequate set of auditory-mental and corresponding universal learning actions, the quality and quantity of which becomes more complicated and expanding as the degree of intellectual difficulty of the socio-cultural situation is increasing. The latter is presented in the content of the audio text and in the adequate learning speech-thinking task. The product of this process is traductive, inductive and deductive reasoning, demonstrating selective, basic or complete understanding of the speaker's statement. The result is the ability of schoolchildren to understand foreign language audio texts with different levels of penetration into their content, as well as the assimilation of a complex of universal learning actions, which are an indicator of their development as subjects of learning activities for mastering foreign language communication. The experimental work confirmed the effectiveness of the system of multifunctional auditory-mental exercises created and adapted to the internal and external conditions of education in the middle school.