AbstractThe article from the standpoint of systemic, synergistic, competent, professionally oriented and communicative-cognitive approaches considers the textbook as a complex didactic-methodical support for the foreign language educational process in non-linguistic universities. This is justified by the high requirements for foreign language training in the situation with few hours for the students learning a foreign language, the lack of quality modern textbooks and uniformed requirements for their creation. The authors define the textbook as the complex didactic-methodical support for foreign language education, identify its main parameters and describe the content of textbook components. The conceptual-objective component represents the global education goal – the formation of professionally oriented foreign language communicative competence; the subject-procedural - the social experience combining the cognitive, reproductive, creative and emotional-value relationships for students to acquire; the instrumental component with a modified polymodal exercise as its elementary unit, which is capable for being incorporated into any educational technology; and the controlling-evaluating component, combining the evaluation criteria and the evaluation funds for the instructor and the self-monitoring and self-evaluating tools for students. The material of the article can be used to create textbooks for foreign language education in universities.