RAILS is a series of online, interactive video-based lessons for intermediate advanced level students of Russian.

The lessons are designed to help students of Russian reach the advanced-level in listening proficiency, as defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines. The advanced level is characterized by the ability to understand the main ideas and important details of connected (paragraph-length) speech on a variety of topics beyond the immediacy of the situation. The RAILS lessons provide an opportunity to work toward advanced-level listening proficiency by working closely with video clips that include examples of paragraph-length discourse.

The lessons were developed for students with approximately 300 hours (two years) of formal classroom instruction in Russian If you have had more or less than this, you can still use the RAILS lessons, but you might find them to be too difficult or too easy, depending on your background.

All of the RAILS lessons are based on excerpts from videotaped interviews with prominent Russians or clips from the films Solovky Power (Власть cоловецкая) and The Children of Ivan Kuzmich (Дети Ивана Кузьмича) by renowned documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. As you work on improving your Russian, you will learn about Russian history and politics.

The RAILS project is led by Professor Benjamin Rifkin (Temple University, formerly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). It is funded through a grant by the U.S. Department of Education.

This slideshow is an introduction to the RAILS lessons that shows you how the lessons are organized.