ACORNS Overview

The ACORNS project supports the language revitalization efforts of Native American tribes, hence the name: [AC]quisition [O]f [R]estored [N]ative [S]peech. The acorn is sacred to the tribes of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The name ACORNS is chosen in honor of these tribes who helped spawn this effort.

We do not collect personal information. You can refer to our privacy disclosure policy page which contains a formal disclosure statement.

Language teachers and their students use the desktop/laptop version of ACORNS to create language lessons which, when executed, enhance language learning. The software is language-independent; in other words, it is an appropriate tool to facilitate the learning of any language.

All ACORNS software is free for non-commercial use. If you have questions or comments, please contact Dan Harvey (harveyd@sou.edu). Full documentation is available at the project web-site (http://cs.sou.edu/~harveyd/acorns).

The Acorns Gallery application is compatible with iPad, iPhone, and iPod devices and allows users to maintain and execute a gallery of language lessons (contained in files with an acorns extension). Lessons can be sent to the gallery either by email attachments, cloud-based storage based apps, or by iTunes file sharing.

The ACORNS software package allows language instructors and students easily to prepare and execute files containing language lessons. Each file contains a series of user-created lessons, which can be linked through the use of mouse clicks. Its implementation is similar to PowerPoint, except instead of preparing slides ant then presenting a slide show, we create language lessons and then students execute them. Presently, the program offers the following lesson types.

ACORNS lessons are intuitive and require minimal technical training. They support any indigenous True Type Font and most popular audio, video, and picture codecs. Presently, ACORNS offers ten types of language learning lessons listed below.

ACORNS Lesson Types

1. Picture and Sound lessons contain a background image to which written and spoken audio attach at various places. Students click on those places and then hear the audio and additional culturally relevant information.
2. Flash Card lessons contain three piles of cards. Initially all of the cards are in the leftmost pile. The student's job is to correctly identify expressions that go with the cards. Enough correct answers cause cards to move between piles. The goal is to move the cards to the rightmost pile.
3. Hear and Click lessons annotate an audio recording of a story with still and animated pictures. Students listen to the story and see random pictures display. Their goal is to click on the appropriate picture as the story plays back. This lesson facilitates immersive audio comprehension.
4. Hear and Respond lessons annotate a lengthy story or speech with its composite words and phrases. Students see the transcript of the recording with some words left blank. The task is to listen and fill in the blanks. This lesson facilitates practice in audio comprehension and correct spelling.
5. Magnet Game lessons display magnets, each containing a word from a sentence. Students drag the magnets over adjacent words. The goal is to reconstruct a group of sentences. When students succeed, they can click on the full sentences to hear audio, see a picture, and view additional cultural information. This lesson supports sub-word morphology so the student can become familiar with word endings and changes as phrases are combined.
6. Missing Word lessons plays an audio in either the gloss or indigenous language. It also displays the sentence with a random word missing. The student's job is to type in the missing word. If correct the next sentence is displayed pertaining to the same category (like travel, activities, shopping, etc.). When completing a category, the student can move to the next.
7. Moving Pictures lessons display four pictures that move about the frame. Students click to hear attached audio. The pictures change every twenty or thirty seconds.
8. Multiple Choice lessons are similar to those found in commercial language acquisition products. Each lesson consists of a group of pictures and recorded audio attached to each. Students see four random pictures displayed and hear a phrase describing one of them. Their task is to click on the correct picture. This lesson offers a fun and intuitive way to practice associating words with concepts.
9. Pictionary lessons show a group of pictures relating to categories of conversational sentences and phrases. Students click on these to hear an audio recording and see descriptive information. It is a simple dictionary shown in pictures.
10. Question and Answer lessons pose questions to the student. If the student answers correctly, ACORNS responds with a positive feedback audio.
11. Story Book lessons link together pages of a story book. Students listen along and watch the captions highlight words during the playback.
12. Translate lessons plays an audio in either the gloss or indigenous language. It also displays the sentence with the words scrambled. The student's job is to use touches or mouse clicks to construct the correct sentence and ignore spurious words that also display. If correct the next sentence is displayed pertaining to the same category (like travel, activities, shopping, etc.). When completing a category, the student can move to the next. This lesson supports sub-word morphology so the student can become familiar with word endings and changes as phrases are combined.

Other Features

• Mobile Applications With a single click, ACORNS can create web-pages that will execute on the mobile device through their browser application. These pages automatically resize according to the display size and will also recognize when the device changes from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal) mode. These Web pages also run using standard desktop browsers.
• Pronunciation feature Students can replay audio that they heard, and if they have a microphone, they can repeat what they heard, and playback to see how their pronunciation compares.
• Language independent speech recognition is integrated into the Questions and Answers lesson type. Students can speak the answer to a question and then ACORNS can verify if they are correct. Language independent speech recognition is a difficult task, so we continue to refine this feature.
• Creating animated pictures ACORNS now has a feature that enables you to easily extract video frames from a camcorder recording and save these as animated GIF pictures. ACORNS supports these in most of its lesson types. Animated pictures are great for showing the movement needed to represent verbs in language instruction.
• Drag and drop A drag and drop facility allows one to use a mouse to drag pictures, audio, and video over the ACORNS application frame and dialog panels and then release to drop. Dropping a file will cause the file to open. Dropping audio into a file dialog or into an audio sound panel will automatically cause the file to be loaded.
• Indigenous feedback The default audio feedback used in lessons is a bird-tweet sound for correct answers; a frog croak for answers that were not quite right, and a squawk for incorrect answers. Users can override these with and record their own feedback responses in their indigenous languages. Each of the three categories of answers can have any number of possible responses.
• Hare Application The ACORNS application incorporates a Hare application. This application allows you easily to edit and manipulate recorded sound files. We believe that this program is more intuitive and easy to use than existing commerical products. Hare also runs as a stand-alone program.
• Wolf ACORNS has created WOLF (Word Oriented Linguistic Framework) for enabling the creation of indigenous dictionaries supporting multiple dialects and audio, visual attachments. Users can convert these dictionaries to Web and Mobile Applications with a single click. WOLF can import dictionaries in MDF format and exports in XML so users can use the data any way they wish.
• Additional applications ACORNS now supports a keyboard mapping program, called ELK ([E]xtended [L]inguistic [K]eyboards) that, unlike existing applications such as UKELELE or Tavaultesoft, works on all platforms and is free for non-commercial use. Finally, we are working on our first version of a dictionary application that can support language archival work, provide a framework for creating dictionary-based games, support multiple dialects and languages, create a web-presense of dictionary data, and support research projects related to automatic speech recognition.
• Language-based instructions ACORNS documentation and program commands can now be language-based. However, translation help is needed. If you are interested, click on the Developers Corner link for more information.

Our long-term focus is to develop tools that will work well for any indigenous language,be useful to language teachers and students, and not require extensive technical training. We welcome your feedback, should you have suggestions.

The author of the original program is Dan Harvey from Southern Oregon Universitym, who retains all copyright privileges. ACORNS software is freeware, and you are granted the right to install it on as many computers as you wish. We do not grant the right to sell the software for profit and it should not be reversed engineered. We hope this software prove useful, but do not guarantee its suitability for any purpose. Using this software implies that you agree to abide by these terms. Please contact the author at harveyd@sou.edu for any questions regarding permissible use. We eagerly seek your comments and feedback.