Nowadays self-directed language learning is considered to be an important goal of higher school as well as a tool to improve the efficiency of learning material acquisition. It also assists in solving a number of tasks related to the formation of communicative foreign language competence, and lexical competence, in particular. At the same time, students of non-linguistic universities do not have a practical readiness for self-directed learning. The article states the relevance of both linguistic and self-educational skills formation in the field of vocabulary teaching\learning. Drawing on the analysis of literature and practical experience, the author describes a wide range of self-educational lexical skills. The paper also provides a level-based system of multifunctional tasks and exercises (receptive-informational, reproductive-mnemic, communicative-practical and reflexive-evaluative), implemented within the framework of individual educational tracks. The effectiveness of the proposed task system has been proved in the course of experimental training.