Contemporary Topics 3: Advanced Listening and Note-Taking Skills, 2nd Edition (Student Book) [Paperback]

David Beglar (Author), Neil Murray (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130948624 | ISBN-13: 978-0130948625 | Publication Date: January 3, 2002 | Edition: 2nd

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

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.

Sample audio

Listen to a sample from the audio program:

Unit 1: Slang

Talking Cool (Selection from complete lecture) (5:14)

 

Click here to order the audio program.

 

www.longman.com/contemporarytopics

Product Details

• Paperback: 102 pages
• Publisher: Pearson ESL; 2nd edition (January 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130948624
• ISBN-13: 978-0130948625
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #623,378 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The series is Perfect!, February 2, 2006

By 

ukranium (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Contemporary Topics 3: Advanced Listening and Note-Taking Skills, 2nd Edition (Student Book) (Paperback)

We use this book in my English for Academic Purposes class to improve note-taking skills. The book explores several different subject areas, so the interest level of my students is high. Each unit contains note-taking tips (the tips are cumulative, building on each aother) for example:

Organize main ideas and supporting details
Note numbers and statistics
Use abbreviations and symbols
etc.

Listening to a lecture and being able to extrapolate relevant or crucial information is the most important comprehension skill for ESL students in a university setting. This book (with the teacher's pack and cd, if not available here, can be ordered from longman.com)delivers in more ways than one.

Each unit also ends with several projects, so you can adapt the book for longer or shorter terms (i.e., Spring or Summer). The companion website also has several links directly related to the reading in each chapter, which helps to reinforce students' vocabulary and see it in a "real-world" setting.

As far as timing, it usually takes about one week (five days) to go through a unit, without doing the projects. You could probably do a unit every three days, or cover a unit in eight days if you were so inclined.

Speaking as an ESL teacher, if you're having a hard time deciding which listening text to get for your course, this is IT!