Functional literacy, in a broad sense, refers to a person's ability to effectively act in non-standard life situations. It is a kind of basic education of an individual characterized by the readiness to successfully realize oneself in the world, solve various life tasks, build relationships in society, and so on.

In a narrow and specific sense, functional literacy includes:
1) Reading literacy – the ability of a person to understand, compose, use, and evaluate texts.
2) Mathematical literacy – the ability of a person to think mathematically, apply mathematical knowledge to solve problems in various practical contexts.
3) Scientific literacy – the ability of a person to take an active civic stance on issues related to natural sciences, enabling decision-making based on scientific facts and understanding the impact of natural processes, science, and technology on the world, economy, culture.

The ability to work with texts, produce them, model them, and analyze them is one of the fundamental elements of functional literacy. Teaching text creation is a crucial task of modern education.

A text is a recorded human thought, a unity of meaningful speech units (sentences), a speech product where any verbal expression, printed, written, or existing in oral form demonstrating structural and semantic completeness can be considered as a text.

Text modeling is a method aimed at creating models of a text or its individual fragments. A text model is a graphic way of representing the semantic information of the text, reflecting the hierarchical intra-textual relationships of its structural components. Text modeling as a methodical technique enables individuals to generalize, classify, systematize acquired knowledge, establish connections and relationships between studied phenomena.

In the process of text production and modeling, learners acquire a set of characteristics that advance them towards acquiring a general characteristic – functional literacy: understanding of the problem and theme, forming personal views, developing the ability to argue their position; shaping a scientific worldview; gaining experience in working with information, mastering skills of selecting and processing information; developing the ability to independently acquire information, gain knowledge; enhancing thinking skills, capacity for generalization, analysis, perception of information, goal setting, and choosing ways to achieve it; improving proficiency in fluent oral and written communication, creating and editing texts.

Teaching text modeling can be done by defining significant keywords for semantic interpretation of the text and associative-meaningful fields.

The relevance of the topic is justified by the requirements of the modern education system to shape a functionally literate individual who is oriented towards realizing their own potential for the benefit of overall societal development.

The research methods employed to investigate the problem included theoretical analysis of psychological and pedagogical literature on the research issue, synthesis of scientific sources, generalization, and observation.

During the writing of the article, the following tasks were solved:
1. Definitions of the terms "functional literacy," "text," and "text modeling" were examined.
2. Features of developing the ability to model text as a key element of functional literacy in an individual were identified.
3. Signs of developed text modeling skills were identified.

Keywords: Functional literacy, text modelling, text production, semantic interpretation, reading literacy.