Academic Literacy in Iranian Higher Education System.Case Study: the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Tehran University

This study investigates the acquisition of academic literacy from the perspective of its three fundamental components: academic writing, academic reading, and critical thinking through a case study for the Faculty of Law and Political Science, University of Tehran. Accordingly, this research, in a qualitative paradigm with an inductive approach that is characteristic of case studies, seeks to gain insight into the quality of academic literacy education and its promotion among undergraduate students of aforesaid faculty. Therefore, the author has attempted to gather the necessary information and indicators which constructs academic literacy through research literature first and then to investigate this phenomenon by designing a questionnaire and interviewing 10 professors. The results of this study indicate that although faculty members agree on most of the capabilities related to academic literacy of students, they still lack the tasks and assignments required to enhance the content area of academic literacy among students. And they do not properly evaluate the status of their students. As a result, the issue of academic literacy is not given much importance in the faculty under study, so newcomer students do not receive enough feedback from their professors to pursue academic discourse on the same basis.