demanding and take longer time to be developed. BICS and CALP are Cummins' terms and could be applied to both first language and second language. That is to say developing BICS in both L1 and L2 takes shorter time than CALP. So a person is academically literate who possesses a deeper level of proficiency, i.e. CALP. But what is of paramount importance here is how CALP could be acquired. Salahshoor (2000) infers from Cummin's dichotomy that there are two ways whereby CALP skills in English could be developed. "One way is through acquiring these skills in first language education and then paving the way for a smooth transfer of these skills into EFL literacy. The second way is an EFL practice that incorporates these academic skills into its pedagogy". But are these solutions invoked in Iran?
             ROLE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
             The salient role, which English has in academic communication, is undeniable. Now the question which may raise in the minds of the readers is that, "why this credit has been put on English? One might imagine that the dominance of English as an international language is due to the fact that it is the language which has the greatest number of native speakers. However this is not the case. According to The World Almanac and book of facts (1998), English is only the fourth language in the world in terms of the numbers who speak it as their first language; it is surpassed by Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish respectively (Table 1). However, English is by far the most popular language to learn as a second or foreign language. One important reason that so many non-native speakers want to learn English in preference to the world's other major languages is undoubtedly to do with economic strength. As Graddol (1997) points out, in order to conduct trade one is likely to be more successful if one speaks the language of the customer. In terms of the economic strength, the countries where English is the first la...