Recent research on EAP vocabulary has mainly revolved around the design of receptively-oriented academic word lists for second language learners doing academic study in English. The University Word List (UWL) (Xue & Nation 1984) and the more recent Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead 2000) were both designed with the assumption that “[a]fter gaining control of the 2,000 high-frequency words [cf. West’s (1953) General Service List], learners need then to focus on academic vocabulary. Knowing the 2,000 high-frequency words and the Academic Word List will give close to 90% coverage of the running words in most academic texts. When this is supplemented by proper nouns and technical vocabulary, learners will approach the critical 95% coverage threshold needed for reading” (Nation 2001: 197).

Knowing a word does not only mean recognizing it in a text while reading though. Knowing a word also means knowing how to use it in context, especially its patterns of use and phraseology as “particular collocations and grammatical patterns may be associated with particular functions of words” (Hoey 1993:82).

However, the phraseology of EAP vocabulary has received relatively little attention in the literature. The field of EAP sorely lacks detailed descriptions of semi-technical vocabulary in context in which “a number of correlations between discourse function, type, syntactic form and frequency” (Moon 1994: 126) would be thoroughly examined.

Furthermore, Xue & Nation’s (1984) and Coxhead’s (2000) basic assumption that an EAP list need not contain general service vocabulary is highly debatable as lexical items may be included in the 2,000 most frequent words and (1) be even more frequent in EAP or (2) be used differently in EAP. For example, Partington (1998: 98) shows that a claim in academic or argumentative texts is not the same as in news reporting and legal report.

We therefore intend:

• to propose methodological guidelines for the selection of EAP vocabulary;
• to carefully describe the phraseology of EAP vocabulary, especially nouns, and their functions, in native and non-native corpora;
• to design a productively-oriented EAP vocabulary list which would provide information on words in context and multiword units. Such a list should not only describe how words are used in native expert writing but it should also be specifically intended to meet learners’ particular needs and remedy their deficiencies.

A careful analysis of the phraseology of EAP vocabulary in non-native corpora should also help us to assess the influence of L1 transfer (vs. developmental influence) in learner phraseological use.

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