The highly flexible BRLI program serves students ranging from intermediate to heritage speakers of Russian. All levels of instruction provide twelve to fifteen hours of in-class contact, either in private tutorials or small groups.
Course offerings vary, but may include:
- The Language of Business Communication: This course focuses on oral communication and comprehension; it is designed to help students understand and use with confidence the language of the contemporary Russian business world. Topics of study include the lexicon of economics, business, international trade, and entrepreneurship. Students learn how to communicate in business meetings, negotiations, official receptions, and board presentations.
- Fundamentals of Business and Commercial Correspondence in Russian: Students learn to analyze and prepare documents for official, commercial transactions, including basic business letters, contracts, and banking documents.
- Russia Today: Social and Economic Issues: This course is designed to acquaint students with fundamental economic issues facing contemporary Russia. Topics of study and discussion include privatization in Russia, corruption and the underground economy, the oligarchs, the investment climate in Russia, and successful businesses in Russia today.
- Conversational Russian: This course gives students the opportunity to develop their speaking skills by presenting a wide range of business-related topics for discussion, including the major ecological, economic, and political issues of the day.
- Russian Business Press: This course is designed to familiarize students with a wide range of publications focusing on economic and political issues. Assignments include close reading and analysis of articles on banking, investment, and monetary reform. Students also examine advertising strategies.
- Russian Culture and the Russian Workplace: This course is designed to help students understand some of the fundamental cultural differences that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings when Westerners do business in Russia. Topics for discussion and study include such broad cultural issues as gender-relations in Russia and the West, as well as Russian and American attitudes toward their jobs and colleagues, supervisor-employee relations, daily schedules, tardiness, vacations, and proper modes of address.
- Business Russian Survival Skills: An essential course for relatively new visitors to Russia, this course examines such potentially challenging tasks as reserving a hotel room, buying a train ticket, ordering a meal in a restaurant, changing currencies, setting up an e-mail account, and opening a bank account.
- Russian Computers: In addition to developing basic proficiency on Russian computers and keyboards, students learn computer terminology and practice written and oral communications designed to help them function effectively in the Russian computer world. Students also explore Russian Internet resources.
Language classes are conducted in small groups of three to five or in one-on-one tutorials. Area studies courses may also be conducted in private tutorials.