The report deals with the problem of the role of polycode and multimodal texts in teaching humanities, in particular in training professional teachers of Russian as the foreign language. The authors highlight the need of including polycode / multimodal texts into the humanitarian lecture discourse. This problem is illustrated by an example of the lecture course on Linguo-Didactic Foundations of Describing Russian as the Foreign Language. The case is made for the possibility of engaging polycode / multimodal texts for the explanation of such concepts as text units, categories of textuality, forms of information, types of cohesion, functional logical types of text, prose systems. The authors made a conclusion about effectiveness of using polycode / multimodal texts in developing students’ interpretative skills of analysis of complex semiotic objects.