The important question that is still unanswered in Iran is what academic literacy is. Finding a definition for 'academic literacy' may pave the way for English teaching technology in the Iranian context to design and implement courses, which meet the needs of those who intend to have a part in international academic communication. Salahshoor (2000:1) defines academic literacy as "the ability to process and produce scientific information", and because English is the main medium of academic communication, it also can be defined as "competence to produce scientific information via the medium of English language"(ibid.).
             In order for a candidate to be able to join the academic communities and act successfully, a set of qualifications is vital. The most indispensable one is academic English literacy. A candidate who is not able to process and produce academic discourses will never be able to get along with the ongoing trend of science and technology. Having academic English literacy necessitates the consciousness of rules and conventions governing scholarly communication. In other words, academic English competence is an essential prerequisite for becoming an academic figure. So an academician should be academically literate, i.e. he should be able to process and produce scientific information. It is commonly assumed that passing a threshold of English proficiency guarantees the successful development of academic English proficiency, but Cummins (1984) argues that it usually takes longer to develop academic skills in English than to develop conversational skills in that very language. So BICS – Basic Interpersonal Communicative Proficiency - doesn't guarantee CALP- Cognitive academic Language Proficiency.
             BICS refers to those aspects of language proficiency which are not cognitively very demanding and take shorter time to be acquired, but CALP, on the other hand, refers to those aspects of language proficiency which are cognitively ...