The purpose of this article was to establish the degree of understanding of novels by pupils on the basis of patterns of interrelation of perceptual, contextual, integrative images, which were formed at different stages of understanding by them the content of the novels in the learning situations of secondary school teaching in the conditions of different literary environment of schoolchildren. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. As the experimental method we used the questionnaire method (we proposed authors’ questionnaires, which had the a...