The Bologna Declaration caused the changes in higher education landscape of Russia and necessitated creation of new methodological approaches for the development of students' independent work organisation and autonomous learning. The modern educational environment provides students with a choice for their achievements and ambitions, setting most favourable conditions for academic autonomy. The topicality of the paper can be attributed to the solution of the main problem of linguistic education to develop students' personality and their autonomous learning. The paper focuses on main elements contributing to the successful development of autonomous learning activity skills based on choice as a teaching method. The authors define four sets of conditions corresponding to four phases of psychological structure of choice - preliminary, pre-actional, actional and post-actional. In the course of the research, testing of methodological pattern of forming autonomous learning skills was carried out, based on choice as the method of teaching foreign languages at Home Reading classes in the Italian language as the minor subject of second-year students at RUDN University. The description of the experimental training, its results and conclusions have proved the fact that a real meaningful choice can be considered from two points of view: as an impetus for the autonomous academic activity and as a factor influencing the development of a self-sufficient determined personality ready for autonomous learning. The initial hypothesis about the viability and effectiveness of the proposed methodological pattern of students' academic autonomy development, based on choice as a method of teaching foreign languages was confirmed by the students' assessment data.