NEW TIMES: EXPANDING HORIZONS IN THE STATE LANGUAGE SCHOOLS This project arises from the concerns that the three State Language Schools (EOI) which have joined in the consortium share on the field of improvement and methodolgy. These three EOI of the island of Tenerife (Santa Cruz de Tenerife , La Laguna and Los Cristianos) have developed a European training programme which include mobilities for teachers of the three centres . The main objective of the plan is to improve our students’ speaking skills in the languages we teach. In addition to this objective, it also aims to improve the level of ICT competence of our teachers and reduce the rates of absenteeism focusing on a better performance of our students. The three EOI have a total of more than 10,850 students and 80 teachers. The number of teachers who have shown interest in participating in the project were 31 with a diversification of languages (English, German, French, Chinese, Spanish for foreigners). These teachers are highly motivated by their work, have a medium to high level in terms of their ICT skills and have shown an interest for such projects allowing them to open their minds to new methodological experiences to improve their work in day to day classes. The activities planned consist in observation activities in other centres in Ireland, UK, Germany and Spain. Through these visits what we are trying to achieve is the observation of good teaching practices that help us to improve one of the chief concerns of language teachers and students who enrol in our centres: improving our students’ skill of speaking. This skill is the most difficult to teach and learn. Language teachers need to be constantly up to date regarding the strategies, tasks and activities for teaching this skill. We also want to know what activities these centres do in relation to the implementation of ICT in language teaching. This will allow us to improve, to expand and improve our own experiences. Training activities in the countries of the language taught have also been designed. These activities are courses organized by institutions with a long tradition in teaching these courses for teachers. Teachers who attend these courses will refresh their language skills just by immersing in the country of the language taught, in addition they will acquire new skills and resources for the teaching of language teaching. The result we intend to accomplish with these two types of activities is that our way of teaching improves so as to offer our students better tools and activities to achieve a higher command in the skill of speaking. The project is accompanied by a series of activities involving all teachers in the project. These activities include attending workshops, meetings and training courses, using a virtual space to share materials and resources and employing different tools available on the web for the dissemination of the project further out, to share our experience inside and outside our schools. As directors of the three centres, we firmly believe that such activities are necessary in the type of centres we lead and the fact of participating through a consortium is beneficial for all the teachers involved in the project as it provides us with the opportunity to share materials and resources, and offers us the possibility of collaborating and share experiences among teachers, something which is essential in school life in general. In short, we are expanding the horizons in our schools.