Active Listening: Introducing Skills for Understanding is the lowest level of the Active Listening series, a three-level listening course in North American English that draws on recent research in comprehension. This high-beginning to low-intermediate text offers 20 engaging, task-based units, each built around a topic, function, or grammatical theme.

Active Listening activates students' knowledge of a topic before they listen, giving them a frame of reference to make predictions about what they will hear. Students learn to listen through a careful balance of activities including listening for gist, listening for specific information, and making inferences.

Major features:

- a "Before You Begin" unit to develop awareness of listening strategies

- pre-listening schema-building activities

- a carefully balanced variety of listening tasks

- natural recordings with a range of accents

- short readings to provide cross-cultural information

- a speaking activity in every unit.

This level of Active Listening consists of a Student's Book, an interleaved Teacher's Edition, two Cassettes, and three audio CDs.