The article is devoted to the problem of formation and development of functional (reading) literacy of students in the context of implementation of the updated FSES. The updated standards predetermine the actual aims of the English language teacher, as well as the priority directions in the work. Consequently, the aim of the research is to identify effective ways of developing schoolchildren’s functional (reading) literacy at English language lessons. In order to achieve the goal, modern approaches to the definition of the concepts of «functional literacy», «reading literacy», «text difficulty factors» in scientific literature were analysed. The author made an attempt to analyse the regulatory documentation in order to identify the model of schoolchildren’s reading literacy development at English lessons. The author also analysed modern didactic materials for the availability of exercises that test and evaluate the level of reading literacy. As the most effective tasks aimed at developing students’ reading literacy, the following are suggested: 1) work with texts with one and several sources, 2) work with static and dynamic texts, 3) work with texts of different formats and types, 4) multi-step tasks. Particular attention is paid to working with non-continuous text and the format of tasks presented in didactic literature.

Keywords: functional literacy, reading literacy, types of reading, Federal Education Standards, Federal Curricular Programme