The relevance of the development of the innovative approach to the formation of the students’ humanitarian knowledge is confirmed by the goals set by the Strategy of development of upbringing in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025. Also, the important reason for this study were the challenges of time, connected with the threats of youth’s self-identification weakening, with the necessity of the youth’s spiritual and moral growth through the activation of historical and cultural memory. In this context it was when the future philologists studied the contemporary Russian literature at the university, which defined both the content and the leading experimental method that showed itself during the stages of the ascertaining, formative and control experiments. The experimental method allowed us to obtain the convincing argumentation of the efficiency of the developed technique of the text competency that contains the achievement of not only the teaching goals but also the educational ones connected with the reader’s self-identification and spiritual and moral growth. The quality of the obtained results, proven by practice, gives us the grounds to recommend the wide application of the developed innovative technique.

humanitarian knowledge, humanitarian education, spiritual and moral growth, self-identification, historical memory, cultural memory, pedagogical innovation, text competency