Contemporary Topics  is a three-level series that prepares students for the challenges of college by presenting a wide range of listening and note-taking strategies while targeting corpus-based vocabulary drawn from the Academic Word List. The series ranges from intermediate to advanced.

Real Talk, by Lida Baker and Judith Tanka, helps intermediate to high-intermediate students break away from the classroom and enter the world of authentic English. Each of the book’s eight thematic chapters has four parts: In Person, On the Phone, On the Air, and In Class. The listening segments expose students to spontaneous face-to-face conversations, phone conversations and pre-recorded messages, radio broadcasts, and academic lectures.