The Academic Encounters series uses a sustained content approach to teach skills necessary for taking academic courses in English. There are two books for each content area. Academic Encounters: Human Behavior engages students with authentic academic readings from college textbooks, photos, graphs, and charts on stimulating topics from the fields of psychology and communications. Topics include stress, health, and nonverbal communication. Students develop important skills such as skimming, reading for the main idea, reading for speed, understanding vocabulary in context, summarizing, note taking, and test preparation. By completing writing assignments of different lengths, students build academic writing skills, respond to the readings, and incorporate what they have learned. The topics correspond with those in Academic Listening Encounters: Human Behavior. The books may be used independently or together.