We are five teachers currently employed at the BG/BRG St Martin which is a secondary school in Villach, Austria. Next year we will be celebrating 20 years of International Bilingual Teaching (IBT) in which at the moment, most subjects are taught in English. One of the applicants is new to our team and plans to introduce mathematics to the programme in the coming school year. The IBT programme itself has blossomed in the last years with 273 students in bilingual classes from 10 to 18 years of age. From a teaching staff of 120 almost a third are now involved in teaching subjects in English to some degree. This year we had more applications to join our classes than ever before and in order to cope with the growing demand, we need to offer teachers appropriate courses where they can develop their teaching skills and cultural awareness in a native English-speaking environment. We have applied for support from Erasmus in order to improve the quality of our teaching competence by furthering our skills and knowledge of the English-speaking part of Europe. The five applicants hoping to attend English courses in London and Galway, Ireland are all non-native speakers and do not speak English as a first language. We therefore dedicate a great deal of our preparation time in finding suitable materials and sources for our respective subjects in the English language. We would all benefit enormously from the cultural exchange and first-hand experience of teaching methods in English speaking countries, as well as learning about new approaches to classroom work and quality and management issues in teaching. We believe that the intercultural experience would bring great benefits not only to the individual quality of teaching of the applicants themselves but also in the sharing of their experiences with the closely-knit IBC team as a whole. Close cultural exchange is an important aspect of our work which can only be achieved by studying methods and language first-hand in English-speaking countries. We therefore request your support and hope that our application to Erasmus will be successful.