It gives me a great pleasure to welcome you all to the academic literacy course. The course is intended as an introduction to academic literacy in English, and is designed to help you gain fluency, in the conventions of academic discourse which refers to the worries of thinking and using language which exist in the academy. The course will help you identify, understand, and write academic text, needed for your academic study and professional practice in your discipline. What is academic literacy? It can be defined as the ability to understand a range of academic vocabulary in context, interpret and use connotations in discipline-specific texts, understand relations between different parts of a text, understand the logical development of an academic text from introductions to conclusions and know how to use language, which serves to make the different parts of a text cohere. Interpret different kinds of academic texts and show sensitivity for the meaning they convey and the audience they are aimed at. Make distinctions between essential and non essential information, fact and opinion, propositions and arguments, and distinguish between cause and effect. Know what counts as evidence for an argument and make meaning of an academic text beyond the level of the sentence. Academic literacy skills can be developed through reading and writing which are essential elements of everyday academic experience. Reading to accumulate knowledge and writing to put knowledge and personal ideas to work. While the main goal of reading is to reflect on meaning, reflecting on language is very important in writing to make sure that ideas are expressed properly. In the first module, you will learn how to become constructively critical as a reader and how you can apply this skill to become self critical as a writer. In addition, the first module focuses on selecting relevant literature and synthesizing sources into a critical analytical argument. The second module introduces word-formation strategies that can be useful for developing your discipline-specific vocabulary. The third module covers basic grammatical conventions that typify an academic writing style. The aim of the fourth module is to familiarize you with academic discourse and ways to present the purpose of your research and its rationale. To engage you in the purpose of learning, we have created a compelling animated story that will keep you guessing about what is there in each video lecture? The main character of the story, a novice researcher, will be going through hardships to the stars in order to become a successful academic writer who knows how to write a well-structured, clear and accurate research publication to get published in a scholarly journal. Prepare yourself to be challenged, excited and inspired. I wish you many wonderful hours of reading and writing with our academic literacy course.