<p>In teaching a language for specific purposes (LSP), a lot of attention is traditionally paid to the lexicon, which often requires a corpus-based approach. The article describes the procedure of creating an academic word list for studying Russian as a second language (L2). It offers an effective way of collecting an academic phrase bank in a specific domain. The article demonstrates typical problems concerning Russian academic vocabulary and the ways of solving them. In this paper, we suggest a methodology for extracting academic vocabulary based on a corpus of up-to-date academic texts of different genres and authors. This study resulted in the creation of an academic word list of economic vocabulary containing about 900 content words. As another applied result, we also present a training platform for L2 academic Russian in the field of economics. The platform allows users not only to explore academic vocabulary in an authentic context, but also to practice it, with or without a teacher. It offers the words and multiword expressions that are the most characteristic in the collected corpus of economic texts. The article contributes both to the field of Russian corpus linguistics and to the teaching of Russian for specific purposes.</p>