The present research is devoted to the study of the role of L1 (Russian) reading ability when reading in L2 (English). The text comprehension was assessed using a question and answer technique and a keywords method (Murzin, Stern 1991). Q&A results analysis did not reveal differences between the number of correct answers to questions for different texts in the same language and the same texts in different, however, a significant difference in comprehension of one of the texts in L1 and another one in L2 was found. It is assumed that this difference is due to a combination of text content and text language factors. Comparison of a set of keywords will allow us to evaluate this contribution of these factors more specifically