The Berufliche Oberschule Pfarrkirchen is always keen to improve the level of teaching and wants to support the teachers as best as possible. Only competent and qualified teaching ensures the future of the school and its attractiveness to students in competition with neighbouring schools. The course held by the NILE institute is part of the school development programme which focusses on the improvement of the teachers' language skills. This is especially important as the school has many new teachers. This is why the Berufliche Oberschule Pfarrkirchen intends to send one member of staff to the teacher training course "Discover Contemporary English" to England. This teacher needs several years of teaching experience and a long-term contract at the school. After finishing the course the teacher is obliged to hold a teacher training course at the Berufliche Oberschule Pfarrkirchen in which he passes on the aquired skills and knowledge to his colleagues. The course "Discover Contemporary English" covers the following areas: - Discourse analysis, with particular reference to contemporary spoken and written texts - Experiencing language awareness tasks - Designing materials for language awareness - Hands-on sessions in the computer lab focusing on working with corpus data and related software - Recent developments and changes in English with particular reference to the impact of the media on the way language is used - Language, jargon and identity in subcultures (e.g. teenagers) and professional groups (e.g. business people, ICT experts) - Corpus studies and ways in which they have influenced the way we perceive and describe language The long-term aim of the teacher training course is to improve the skills of all the teachers of English, to keep up the good results in the final examinations and the good reputation of the school as well as our students' contentment with the level of teaching. The course mentioned above is only one part to achieve the long-term aims and will be supplemented by further courses on a regional, national and international level.