This paper is devoted to the theoretical and methodological justification of the textbook entitled "Comment rédiger un essai en droit", which is aimed at mastering the skills of the French scientific academic discourse by law students of the senior stages of their university studies. The paper reveals the subject-functional and personal-significant potentials of the textbook, offers a detailed list of the formed discursive competence components. It is emphasized that the production of its textual embodiment is a creative process that ends with the students writing a research paper. This process is characterized by complex logical and cognitive operations, intensive search activity, which determine not only the foreign language skills formation, but also the development of the future specialists’ personality. In this regard, the creation of a professional essay to be a pedagogical technology that ensures such a process implementation and the creation of a new work, at the same time. Accordingly, its stages are distinguished, as well as the skills, abilities, and strategies to be formed in correlation to each of them. The methodology of their formation includes a certain set of knowledge delivered to the students, their doing a cycle of exercises, characterized as cognitive, conditional-communicative, and purely communicative. It is also emphasized that the developed methodology effectiveness was tested as a result of its long-term application at the two universities, on the basis of ongoing monitoring, conducting inter-semester and final state exams.

French academic discourse, pedagogical technology, training methodology