Engaging in Illinois in Vienna Virtual Program truly diversified my summer experience. Working with Station Wien, a non-profit organization in Vienna, provided me with opportunities to tutor a high school student online in English. In the past ten weeks, from an English learner's point of view, I taught her how to discuss daily topics, share English movies and TV shows, supplement news hot topic materials, and so on. Just because English is not my mother tongue, I can look at some English learning problems from this student's point of view. Furthermore, in the teaching process, I also teach myself some knowledge, including some unfamiliar English topics and teaching students' skills. When two non-native English speakers study English together, the most significant difficulty I encounter is that my students sometimes cannot ignore what I think is a simple word. At the beginning of the course, this point caused unknown obstacles to my course progress; But after constant running-in, for example, she offered to interrupt me actively when she did not understand. I can repeat or spell words, and there are many such scenes. Also, I received many guides from my mentor in Station Wien. We talked with each other regularly to overcome some difficulties in my teaching. It is worth mentioning that I also learned a lot about the local conditions and customs of European countries, especially Vienna, Austria, including their culture, climate, education, and so on, which stimulated my great interest to exchange here in the future. I encourage everyone to participate in this project, and you can certainly gain something from it.

IiVP Alumna Xinjin Li