It's weird, but I tend to be relatively good at speaking and crap at listening in every language I've studied. I have poor aural discrimination, but I usually manage to develop a decent accent (eventually). I have trouble parsing fast speech, but I can string words together pretty well. Weird, huh? I think a lot of it depends on what the learner focuses on. I talk to myself a lot in Japanese (shut up) so I guess that's where my ability comes from.

I focus a lot on grammar too but I don't worry about it too much when I'm speaking. Blah blah blah whatever oops I made a mistake ah ha oh well.

Ooh, CIR? Nice! We ALTs always looked up to the CIRs a ton because their Japanese was so good. Was never quite sure what they do though. I always got the impression that CIR jobs are more varied than ALT jobs. Sounds like fun though.