We are delighted to announce the first summer school in Machine Learning for Digital English Language Teaching (ELT), to be held 3-7 July 2017, in Chania, Crete, Greece, organised by the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment Institute, University of Cambridge.

The effectiveness of the next generation of educational technology to support English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners will depend on the quality of the guided instruction and automated feedback that can be provided for learners and their teachers online. To date, most automated feedback in digital products for ELT has been limited to multi-choice questions and closed-question gap-fills. The Summer School will teach participants the core principles and methods from the fields of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Psychometrics that underpin summative assessment of free-text answers to prompts, formative feedback on writing quality, and psychometric profiling to support personalised adaptive learning.

The Summer School would suit technically-minded ELT professionals from all spheres who want to better understand the technology behind and capabilities of such products as Cambridge English Write & Improve, and the Oxford Vocabulary Trainer App, and/or would like to integrate these capabilities into language teaching syllabuses or courseware. No in-depth technical knowledge is required as informal hands-on sessions will be guided by software developers.

We will be limiting attendee numbers to a maximum of 35 to ensure that they can interact with each other and us in a relaxed environment. Information about registration is available here.

Important Dates

Organising Committee

Sponsors