increasing academic and professional language demands around the world are not a deniable fact. the purpose of this study was to investigate english language needs and communication needs of the chemistry students at master and ph.d. levels at the iranian universities. in this research, different methods were used including un-structured interview, structured interview, and two sets of questionnaires. one hundred twenty students (93 master and 27 ph.d.), majoring in different sub-disciplines of chemistry from university of kashan and university of yazd, and also a total number of 36 subject- specific teachers and 14 english language teachers from three universities of iran including kashan, yazd, and qom participated in the study. after conducting un-structured interviews with eight chemistry students and two subject-specific teachers at the university of kashan, two sets of questionnaires were developed. the researcher distributed the questionnaires and interviewed the participants. to analyze the data, one-way anova was conducted on each part of the questionnaires, and also t-test was used to compare the students’ and teachers’ responses. the results showed that teachers and students found reading, writing, and vocabulary knowledge to be more important than the other english language skills. it was also discovered that reading chemistry articles and abstracts, writing articles, abstracts, and emails, listening to the lectures in conferences and listening to the discussions in seminars, speaking with the specialists of the field of study and also presenting chemistry articles orally were perceived to be the at the top of the list of communication needs of the iranian chemistry students at master and ph.d. levels. the students and teachers almost had the same perceptions regarding language needs and communication needs of the chemistry studetns. teachers and students were not very satisfied with the present language teaching and learning condition at the universities of iran and complained that the students are ill-prepared for the work setting. teachers and students complained that esp and general english courses are not very successful in boosting students english language knowledge. the course designers and material developers and also efl department may consider the results and may be inspired to make necessary changes.