The aim of the work is to identify the possibilities and specifics of using corpus methods in conducting research on the material of the French language and in teaching French. The growing interest in the methods of corpus research based on specific language data and the insufficient development of the issue on the material of the French language determine the relevance of the work. The analysis has shown that today there are various resources for conducting corpus research on the material of the French language, including literary text corpora, parallel corpora, oral speech corpora, which create a specially organized multidimensional infrastructure of the language space, giving a comprehensive idea of language units, their compatibility, semantics and functions. The authors have demonstrated that the existing corpus managers can be successfully applied in teaching French at the initial level, from the very beginning forming important linguistic and methodological competencies among linguist students. The scientific novelty of the research consists in a comprehensive review of the existing French corpus resources and the possibilities of their use in research and in teaching French. The results of the study can be used both for further development of research in the field of history, grammar, lexicology, stylistics of the French language based on corpora, and for the development of tasks for teaching French using corpus data, which is of practical significance of the study.