The Contemporary Topics Series prepares students for the challenges of college by presenting a wide range of listening and note-taking strategies and skills. Targeting corpus-based vocabulary drawn from the Academic Word List, Contemporary Topics ensures that students will be familiar with the most frequently used academic terms. The twelve lectures at each level are drawn from a range of academic disciplines, and are recorded to reflect natural interaction between professor and students. Each level offers these features:

• Realistic lectures on topics of current interest.
• Pre-listening activities designed to activate prior knowledge, to introduce key vocabulary, and to provide notetaking tips, models, and practice.
• A wide range of listening strategies including predicting, inferring, listening for the main idea, and listening for details.
• "Using Your Notes" lecture review activities.
• Projects including in-class discussions, presentations, contact assignments, and research projects.
• Listening quizzes for each unit.
• Teacher Packs for each level, including photocopiable quizzes, answer keys, and audioscripts for both lectures and quizzes.