The article provided a survey of the approaches and methods to develop the universal learning skills among students of the English department. The cognitive universal learning skill was in the limelight. The problem under study was to build the method of achieving the learning skill to analyze a literary text by the series of learning operations. 132 students were invited to justify the authors' methodology of cognitive universal learning skill development. As the approach suggested the implementation of the indicative framework for actions formation lessons were planned accordingly. The research work lasted for one academic year and revealed a number of benefits of the approach under consideration as well as drawbacks. Among the benefits the authors highlighted the prolonged positive effect of the indicative framework for actions formation: learning motivation increased, students noted that text analysis tasks appeared to be exciting rather than dull. On the other hand, the approach suggested that students were not given any forms of clichés and samples for text analysis which first led to frustration as they noted. Nevertheless, group work and mutual assistance resolved difficulties. The research method was the statistics data analysis and its interpretation; the cognitive study, the methods and approaches analysis proper. To generalize, classify and interpret the results observed the descriptive method was used. In addition, there were used elements of quantitative methods of analysis and also scientific methods of observation, generalization and comparison. It should be noted that in the course of the research process the linguistic data and methodology data were involved together with the general linguistic, pedagogy, and cultural data. As a result, the most common and effective approaches and methods were singled out and their choice explained. The results showed that in the course of teaching literary text analysis we encounter various difficulties connected with the student's ability to analyze and interpret, to generalize and explain the choice of lexis and stylistic elements.