In modern didactics, there is a whole theory of competency-based approach to teaching disciplines. The article discusses the problems of the formation of professional competence оf students when learning vocabulary of a foreign language on the basis of texts of a technical specialty. The main goal is the assimilation of the lexical and stylistic features of scientific terminology in technical texts for practical work in the specialty, in our case, the field of energy. Texts and assignments are proposed that take into account the indication of scientific and technical terms, drawing up logical circuits, the ability to draw conclusions, find arguments, etc.