Synopses & Reviews
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.
www.longman.com/contemporarytopics Table of Contents
Unit 1 Happiness
Topic: Psychology
Note-Taking Tip: Note main ideas and details
Unit 2 New Kinds of Food
Topic: Biology
Note-Taking Tip: Note subtopics
Unit 3 Public Art
Topic: Art
Note-Taking Tip: Note descriptions
Unit 4 Journey to Antarctica
Topic: History
Note-Taking Tip: Note dates and events
Unit 5 Violence on Television
Topic: Media Studies
Note-Taking Tip: Note numbers
Unit 6 Too Old to Learn?
Topic: Linguistics
Note-Taking Tip: Listen for signal phrases
Unit 7 Are We Alone?
Topic: Astronomy
Note-Taking Tip: Listen for theoretical questions
Unit 8 Do the Right Thing
Topic: Ethics
Note-Taking Tip: Note definitions
Unit 9 A Good Night's Sleep
Topic: Public Health
Note-Taking Tip: Note causes and effects
Unit 10 Negotiating for Success
Topic: Business
Note-Taking Tip: Note examples
Unit 11 Risking It
Topic: Statistics
Note-Taking Tip: Note comparisons and contrasts
Unit 12 The Electronic Brain
Topic: Technology
Note-Taking Tip: Choose the best note-taking techniques
Appendix A: Academic Word List
Appendix B: Affix Charts