Luna reaches out - Sapporo

I need to thank my Friday students for accepting the fact that I have to travel occasionally, with our school's commitment to promoting Cambridge ESOL Examinations/developing professional awareness across the country. Sometimes I simply cannot get to places and back again in the space of a weekend.

This weekend I am going to be training and co-ordinating Oral Examiners in Sapporo; I was here earlier in the year making a presentation sponsored by Oxford University Press to Hokkaido's mini JALT conference about the exams... Tonight it was time to follow up initial interest with a presentation to potential recruits with specific information about the exams, their levels, availability and especially the responsibilities of Oral Examiners.

It was good to catch up with some familiar faces from conferences and events I've attended in the past, and to touch base. English teachers are busy people (often unappreciated), so having a good turn out on a Friday night before a long holiday was particularly gratifying. Thank you JALT Hokkaido & OUP for initially inviting/sponsoring me; thank you Brick for sorting out the room at Hokkai Gakuen (very nice AV systems) and to Peter for getting folks together.

Following our communal chat about Common European Frameworks, rubrics, interlocutors, etc, we knuckled down to the serious business of actual training - my group this evening working very hard to get to grips with KET, until past 11pm. Managing to stay awake was not a problem; there was plenty of debate about materials and teacher vs examiner roles etc that kept us all going until we were obliged to leave.

Well done trainees, and thanks all for coming to my presentation.