Top-Up Listening series
by Chris Cleary, Bill Holden and Terry Clooney
Series Editor: Maurice Jamall

ABAX Catalog | Classroom Text | College Students | Listening and Speaking

"...actually teaches students how to listen"

- Bronia Holmes, in English Teaching Professional (Book Reviews, Issue 30, January 2004)

Intro to the series | Sample pages | Audio Files

Teacher's Notes | Answer Key | Student Tests

View the Table of Contents for Top-Up 1 | 2 | 3

Combing Top-down listening skills together withan explicit focus on the bottom-up decoding skills, all within a communicative framework. Students get practice in listening for meaning and looking at language form. Listening as it was meant to be taught!

Top-Up Listening 1, 2, 3
by Chris Cleary, Bill Holden and Terry Clooney

Series Editor:
Maurice Jamall

Text & Audio CD
ISBN 1-896942-13-X
$16.95

Level: The Top-Up series progresses from the Elementary to the Pre-Intermediate level.

Request a sample copy

The Top-Up Listening series features English as it is actually spoken.

Top-Up gives students practice in drawing meaning from naturally spoken English in two ways: using their knowledge of the world and of the language to guess what's coming next, and using their knowldge of how English is actually structured as a sound.

Whaddaweemean? - how words run together, how sounds are lost, how vowels naturally weaken and entire words are dropped. Without knowledge of such patterns, listening is impossible. Lots of practice! Lots of variety!

Top-Up Features

• A wide range of listening types: announcements, newscasts, conversations, service encounters
  < listen to a sample announcement | list all audio files>
• A wide variety of listening tasks: listening for gist, listening for overall understanding, listening for specific information
  < listen to a sample conversation | list all audio files>
• Practice in inferencing, practice in using knowledge of content, practice in predicting and checking
• Listening Clinics: explicitly teaching the sound system of English — how sounds change or are lost or are inserted, how sounds run together
  < listen to a sample Listening Clinic| list all audio files>
• Speaking tasks: helping students think about and get ready for what they will hear and giving students the opportunity to use language from the listening in an active way
• Topics of intrinsic interest to college-age students
  <View the Table of Contents for Top-Up 1 | 2 | 3>
• An attractive and colorful layout
  <view a sample page from Top-Up 1 | list all sample pages>

For information on the background SLA theory behind Top-Up Listening and why you need to be teaching listening "explictly" please click here.

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