I. YAKOVLEV CHUVASH STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY BULLETIN

practical training, teaching the second foreign language, receptive speech skills, reading, text, selection criteria for texts, techniques, methods.

Throughout many centuries the role of educational text in teaching foreign languages has been underestimated. The representatives of various West European schools did not consider speech work either as the training purpose, or as its subject. The situation changed only by the end of the 19^th century when an increasing number of scientists began to consider a specific role of the educational text in the course of training. One of the factors complicating the process of teaching of reading abilities in the second foreign language are the discrepancy of text material to conditions and peculiarities of training in the second foreign language. The article considers the peculiarities of educational texts, their complexity and the requirements for these texts. To understand a text it is necessary to take into account the factors of its creation, content and structure. The authors reveal and analyze extra- and intralinguistic factors that contribute to the structure and content of these texts. The complexity of the texts is considered in terms of the two notions: the complexity and hardness of the material. The research objective is the development of selection criteria for educational texts in teaching the second foreign language at the faculty of foreign languages.