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Most studies of vocabulary in English for Academic Purposes (EAP)(Nation 2001: 187-216) have emphasized the importance of a'sub-technical'or'academic'vocabulary alongside core words and technical terms in academic discourse. A variety of word lists have been compiled to meet the specific vocabulary needs of students in higher education settings. The'Academic Word List'(AWL)(Coxhead 1998) is the most widely used today in language teaching, testing and materials development. It consists of 570 word families that are not in the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English as described in the'General Service List of English Words'(GSL)(West 1953) but which have wide range and reasonable frequency of occurrence in a 3,500,000 word corpus of academic texts. Taken together, words of the GSL and the AWL and domain-specific items should approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reasonable reading comprehension (Nation 2001: 197). While the AWL is certainly a good supplement to the GSL for receptive purposes, it is however questionable whether all words in the list should be the focus of productive activities in EAP classes. Learners' needs for academic writing are clearly not the same as for academic reading. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how EAP would gain significantly from the design of a productively oriented academic wordlist and we will address important methodological issues for the development of such a list. We will first discuss the notions of frequency, keyness and range and question the widely used criterion of non-appearan...