A quiet Sunday afternoon?

A2 Key SE Team contemplating

Our Jim was online on Sunday afternoon, talking to Cambridge Speaking Examiners from around the country (Nagoya, Kagoshima, Kobe, Sapporo, Oita, Fukuoka & Tokyo) who are all English language teachers from around the world - Jamaica, Scotland, USA, Canada, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia, Syria, China, the Philippines, Japan & England...

Of course Jim could not resist some rugby 'banter' & cricket chat...but quickly encouraged to move on!

The serious matter in hand was certifying participants for their roles delivering and assessing speaking tests, which is not exactly easy on a zoom...but the bonus is that members of our far-flung team get to talk to and share ideas & insight with other teachers they're rarely likely to meet. Having said that, we are turning to some remote assessment solutions to geographical problems, where we do not have enough examiners on site & instead need to rely on team members elsewhere online. This not without its own challenges, but being familiar with the potential issues using zoom & peripherals helpful, and learning from each other (not just Jim talking) beneficial. Jim always prefers to encourage the team to share & develop from peer experience rather than him reading from the script.

B1 team SE working hard

Our afternoon covered three exam levels - A2:Key, B1:Preliminary and B2:First. All of these levels incidentally, which we at Luna aspire for our students to achieve...SEs were challenged to manage test materials online - harder than face to face, to be honest (rotating PDFs, using multiple devices or screens - or just one!?), and to demonstrate their familiarity with scripts, procedures and timings. This is an annual requirement of all SEs around the world, to ensure validity. Any exam, globally, must be to standard, and certification is the time to prove it. This is not a rubber stamp exercise!

B2 SE team with guest appearance - the boss!

Jim also tries to add variety to certification meetings, without wasting time. Instead, new/varied ways to focus participants on the same requirements - accurate delivery of course, but also dissecting candidates' performances forensically, fairly. Every examiner has different interpretations of particular aspects of spoken output, but with all our mutual years of experience, the discussion we have after any video is
always enlightening...we learn from each other, adjust our inbuilt bias, and achieve really accurate analytical scores. Do we all completely agree? No, and we never will! Are we using the same terminology to diagree a bit - yeah? Absolutely fine :)

Really glad we were able to make sure our outlying speaking examiners' certification is looked after for 2026, and that we could connect/re-connect. jim is really looking forward to not having to do this so much via zoom next year. Instead, face to face meetings & long-overdue socials afterwards in order.