For students with at least 350 hours of prior formal instruction in Russian, or fewer hours of formal instruction but a semester or more in Russia. In this class, students already have a firm grasp of the grammatical problems in Russian, such as participles, verbal adverbs, quantitative expressions (measurements and other numeric expressions), and verbs of motion. Students work hard on expanding their vocabulary in this course, building up semantic fields in various topic areas related to both everyday and political/societal topics (active vocabulary of 2,250 words). Students watch Russian films, read short stories, poetry, and newspaper articles, complete listening and writing assignments on journalistic topics, and complete oral assignments including the preparation and delivery of short presentations. We expect students to complete this course with intermediate high to advanced low language skills.