Water issues in the archives of the French royal forestry administration (16 th -18 th centuries).

Sébastien Poublanc PhD Student Framespa

My research topic is "The sylvan king: Southern society and forests during the Modern Era". My archives also deal with water management since the Forestry administration took control over the maintenance of the environment. The royal administration "Eaux et Forêts" was created by Philip IV the Fair during the Thirteenth Century. While it was mainly dedicated to forest conservation, it also had a civil and criminal jurisdiction on the aquifer.

During the Seventeenth Century a major reform was implemented in order to strengthen and clarify the respective authority of the various forestry departments-called grandes maîtrises des Eaux et Forêts. This reform was known as the Great Reformation and part of its archives concerned the water jurisdiction1 .

The main reformer, Louis de Froidour, established numerous regulations to:

-clear river beds (with the aim of facilitating the supply of cities through watercourses); -protect fish resources from overfishing in the ponds of the Lower Languedoc area; These regulations were designed both to protect populations and to allow a good and healthy exploitation of the forests, thus behaving like good fathers-"en bons pères de famille."

-Developing river systems

The river system specifically drew the attention of the Commissioners reformers. Indeed, the secondary road network was underdeveloped and was highly unsuitable for the transport of materials as large as logs. The waterway thus became the main communication channel to transport the goods and resources to the main economic centers. The transportation took the form of timber rafting (Figure 2) or log driving (Figure 3). In order to facilitate the delivery, the reformers listed the usable waterways and facilities so as to make them navigable. To do this, the reformers assessed the wood resources of each forest in relation to the geographical proximity of the river systems. The repetition of these studies allowed them to actually go and see the various rivers and streams, and to put them on a map. The example of the Ardèche River is emblematic of these visits. During the visit, the most dangerous places, for the radeliers and for the wood, were written down on a list. Thus, the same minutes indicate that:

Au dessoubs d'Aubenas en un endroit appellé le gourd Baudoin un tournant fort court par le moyen duquel ayant reconnu que les mats pourroient estre jettés contre les rochers contre lesquels non seulement ils pourroient estre arrestés mais aussi estre brisés The gain, for marine construction and refueling populations was crucial. Indeed, the plain forests were either in poor condition or located outside the major human settlements. So it was crucial to fetch wood from other areas, sometimes very far. Thus, Toulouse was supplied via the Comminges and the Lower Languedoc from the Sault's country. Such geographical constraints required the establishment of structures dedicated to river control. They appeared sometimes very early (at the beginning of the Modern Era). Ensuring timber traffic, checking that the riverbed was not hampered by the numerous mill roads or by the devices of the fishermen, and preventing flooding... are only a few concerns among many other, that forest officers had to deal with, as the following minutes suggest :

Nous avons trouvé la riviere traversée et embarrassée de plusieurs digues de grez et cailloux faittes par divers particuliers pour en divertir l'eau et faire tourner des moulins qu'ils ont basti le long d'icelle et mesme par divers pescheurs des lieux riverains pour y tendre des cliches et cavices (...) pourquoy il est necessaire de rendre ordonnance pour obliger les particuliers a oster ces empeschements 5 .

It appears that these skills and activities led to many lawsuits between individuals and forest officers, as well as between the different components of the forest administration.

-Judicializing the environment

The Marble Table (which is the highest forestry's court in the province) claimed to have jurisdiction over the water issues, and prevented officers of the "maîtrises particulières" from exercising their jurisdiction. This caused an administrative as well as judicial blockage that kept the administration from verbalizing the individuals who ignored orders concerning the maintenance of windmills and channels. This block led to devastating floods, because the channels that were commonly used to channel away the overflow of water were no longer being cleaned and were thus unable to fulfill their derivation function. The bridges, roadways' mills or mills themselves were no longer able to resist heavy water surges, that Froidour attributed to "l'excessive hauteur et de la proximité des montagnes d'où dessendent, causent ordinairement par leurs inondations de grands ravages6 ". The flooding also ravaged many land plots (indeed without any drainage, the water stagnates, makes these plots unusable or ruining the crops. But the cities were by far the most damaged, as Toulouse was during the flood of 1727. No less than 939 houses were destroyed and 50 people died.

The management of the environment (even if the concept didn't exist as such during the Ancien Régime) appears in the forestry administration's archives under the form of a litigious and increasing legislation. This form of management reached its peak in the regulations that were enacted in order to protect fish resources, particularly in the Lower Languedoc.

-Protecting a coveted resource

The use of fishery resources was common the entire territory of the grande maîtrise. However, the case of the Lower Languedoc was different. It was the only place where the activity of the maîtrise was mainly devoted to the monitoring and to the proper management of ponds in the diagonal Saint-Gilles/Marseillan. The importance of fisheries for the economy and for the everyday life explains this peculiarity: the ponds were not open spaces. They were rented and subservient spaces, meant to provide incomes to their owners : "tantost du cinquiesme poisson, tantost de onze deux et quelques fois de onze un, ce qu'on appelle pulment (du latin pulmentum, la chère)7 ". As such, they were subject to tax and benefit of a register as shown in the following slide. To do this, it was necessary to ensure the maintenance of lagoon ecosystems. So as to avoid the depopulation of ponds, the king's officers were obliged to draft a series of rules capable of sparing the delicate balance between fishing and the income it generates. In fact, despite its artisanal proportion, fishing caused a significant subtraction in fisheries. We must picture ourselves these ponds as spaces split down by many nets, near the banks, or all along their width, as illustrated in the following slide. These fisheries, also called maniguieres, included a large number of facilities which worked as cages to trap the fish. While most of them targeted specific fish species using specific mesh sizes, some caught fish of all sizes and all ages. The officers tried to ban these kind of devices.

To do this, several rules were enacted. Several of them retain more attention as they are emblematic of a rational use of the resource, through a strict control of the environment. First of all, the devices that did not select specific fish were removed:

Nous jugeons que les maniguieres, principalement celles de la tranchée ou l'on tend soixante et dix Berthouleres qui ne laissent passer aucun poisson sont tres dangereuses (...) et que si l'on deffendoit d'en user, les estangs seroient incomparablement mieux peuples de poisson8 .

Meanwhile, the commissioners recommended freeing the grau (that is to say, the estuary of the lagoon) from any device, to allow the regeneration of fish stocks and to avoid to "scare" it too much. Finally, a greater control of the fishing season was enacted, in order to let the fish spawn again without loss to rebuild the stock:

Et comme le poisson fraye dans la mer aux mois de fevrier et de mars, il seroit bon que toute sorte de pesche fut deffendue pendant ce temps la et mesme jusques au mois de may, parce que le petit poisson passe de la mer a l'estang pendant ce temps la (...) Il faudra du moins ordonner que pendant led. temps, les passages des maniguieres demeureront entierement ouvertes9 .

These many issues developed here were particularly crucial for the people whose income and livelihood depended on these lagoons. One may read between the lines that overfishing threatened the regeneration of the resource.

Conclusion

Let me now briefly conclude this presentation stating that the water issues constitute a significant part of the archives of the forestry administration. The brief examples that I have just been presenting are only a small part of the wealth of this fund, which is too often ignored, contrary to the fund of Bridges and Floor or of the Admiralty archives.

The issues related to the control and to the good management of the aqueous resource were both economic and societal. Like the forests, these water issues constituted the two facets of a environmental management, even though it was not called as such.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Ressort de la grande maîtrise des Eaux et Forêts de Toulouse en 1666.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Radeliers ou carrassiers (timber rafting), Aude, 1906.

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Lâcher à buches perdues (log driving), no place, no date.

3 .

 3 Each time, if the Council of State decided that the cost of the development work was compensated the by income of timber management, then the work was undertaken. In his letters, Froidour recounts the episode of a Pyrenean river where dozens of boulders were destroyed rocks by mines : D'autres ouvriers sont employez à nettoyer le canal de la rivière et à ranger à droitte et à gauche les pierres et les cailloux pour luy faire un bord afin que pouvant contenir l'eau plus haulte, elle puisse plus commodement porter et faire descendre les matz. Il y a 200 ouvriers employez à cela, et comme la rivière est embarassée ou traversée de quantité de rochers, il y a 30 ouvriers employez à faire des mines pour les briser afin qu'on puisse facilement porter à la droitte et la gauche de la rivière et rendre son canal libre 4 .

Figure 4 .

 4 Figure 4. Lagoons in the maîtrise of Montpellier (http://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/)

Figure 5 .

 5 Figure 5. Détail des plans des maniguières qu'estoient autres fois dans l'estang de Tau sur le privage du pioch de la montagne de Cette. Archives départementales de l'Hérault, C 1246, Eighteenth Century ; in Giovannoni, Vincent. (1995) Les techniques traditionnelles ont une histoire : éléments pour une analyse ethno-historique des engins et des techniques de la pêche dans I'étang de Thau (Languedoc), Questions sur la dynamique de l'exploitation halieutique, Montpellier, ORSTOM Éditions, p. 219.

Figure 7 .

 7 Figure 7. Maniguière, in Giovannoni, Vincent. (1995) Les techniques traditionnelles ont une histoire : éléments pour une analyse ethno-historique des engins et des techniques de la pêche dans I'étang de Thau (Languedoc), Questions sur la dynamique de l'exploitation halieutique, Montpellier, ORSTOM Éditions, p. 223.

A detailed description of this archives is available online ; Poublanc, Sébastien (2013) L'usage de l'archive comme fondement du pouvoir monarchique : la forêt de papier de la réformationde Froidour (1666de Froidour ( -1673)), Les Cahiers de Framespa. Nouveaux champs de l'histoire sociale, n°13, http://framespa.revues.org/

Archives Départementales de la Haute-Garonne, 8 B 033, f°74 v.

Ibid., f°77 v.

[START_REF] Castéran | Lettres écrites par M. de Froidour, grand maître enquêteur et général informateur des Eaux et Forêts au département de la grande maîtrise de Languedoc à M. de Hericourt, son procureur général à Toulouse et à M. de Medon, conseiller au présidial de Toulouse[END_REF] Lettres écrites par M.de Froidour, grand maître enquêteur et général informateur des Eaux et Forêts au département de la grande maîtrise de Languedoc à M. de Hericourt, son procureur général à Toulouse et à M. de Medon, conseiller au présidial de Toulouse, publiées avec des notes par M. Paul de Casteran, Auch, Imprimerie et lithographie G. Foix, p. 67.

Ibid., f°80 v.

Archives Départementales de la Haute-Garonne, 8 B 025, f°274 v.

Archives Départementales de la Haute-Garonne,

B 020, f°154 r.

Ibid., f°150 r.

Ibid., f°153 r.


Jean Léo Léonard

Julie Mccabe

Karla Janiré Avilés

Julie Mccabe Gragnic

Current Issues in Language Planning 3-04, 2013

Keywords: education, applied linguistics, indigenous languages, language planning, reflexivity, agency

In a national context where the language rights of indigenous people have been recognized constitutionally since 2003, we deal with the following questions: How can bilingual education programmes in Mexico be clearly defined and applied? And what exactly are the final objectives of a bilingual education programme?

We shall address the issue of the potential forms and contents of bilingual education from the standpoint of our experience working with schoolteachers, in co-participative educational workshops in two multilingual areas in Central and South-Eastern Mexico, from 2009 to 2012. Indeed, the multidimensional use of native languages and knowledge through workshops held in a number of Mexican languages, in which the participants produce texts and drawings in their native languages, directly raises pedagogical issues on language planning in the classroom,.

The dominant model for Bilingual & Intercultural Education (BIE) in Mexico today corresponds to a model of incorporation through subtractive bilingualism: teaching in the native language, switching then to Spanish in order to teach the official pedagogical contents, and in detriment of language and culture specificities. Our work suggests that BIE could represent a constructive, empowering alternative, adapted to local community contexts, yet steering away from the segregationist model of education.

Language planning: realization and implementation in a Mexican context

This article reflects upon and demonstrates how Language Planning may be applied to Mexican indigenous languages, based on both theory and history but also upon experience gained via a set of alternative educational workshops held with Nahuatl, Mazatec, and Tének schoolteachers and their pupils and/or the teachers and students of pedagogical institutions and universities 1 , over the last three years (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012). We will thus discuss the theoretical foundations of language policies/language planning, suggesting a critical thinking model of bilingual education adaptable to every sociolinguistic context.

The dominant model of Language Planning in Mexico, as within other national contexts, still follows the initial conception expressed by Haugen as "the activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance or writers and speakers in a non-homogenous speech community" (1966-1972, p. 161). It is then limited to a linear process of linguistic codification and standardization. In other words, writing is the priority of language planning in many contexts, including oral cultures, as shown within the Mexican context (Avilés González, in press). The National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), one of the most important institutions for language policy in the country, assumes this direction (INALI, 2009). Questions of power, prestige, the societal functions of the language and other sociolinguistic aspects associated with status planning and language uses are often excluded from the institutional language planning agenda. Due more often than not to inertia, the links with the societal, political and economic factors that surround language vitality are quite simply neglected.

In contrast with this model, in different sociolinguistic contexts, history suggests that language planning -the application of language policies-is more complex than electing a codification system, compiling a dictionary or describing a grammar (see among others Fishman, 2006;Ninyoles, 1971Ninyoles, -1997;;[START_REF] Calvet | La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques[END_REF]. As Fishman suggests (1991, 2006), the latter are components of corpus planning, which in turn is part of an altogether different level of linguistic intervention (along with status planning, and with government and civil initiatives). The main goal of this kind of intervention is to normalize a language's practices; not only to establish norms of writing, but also to unravel diglossic situations rendering normal a language-in-culture, as Ninyoles says "situar-la en peu d'igualtat amb unes altres cultures, en un mateix pla" (1997, p. 115, author's translation: make it equal with other cultures, putting it on the same level).

Within this framework normalization efforts are not necessarily submitted or linked to government initiatives. Even if the government bodies prove useful for acknowledging language policies and linguistic rights, in some cases they block language normalization, generating for example, circles of intellectual caciques (i.e. local power-wielding authorities.) that monopolize linguistic capital (see [START_REF] Bourdieu | Langage et pouvoir symbolique[END_REF], as well as physical and economical resources (Flores Farfán, 2009:40;Flores Farfán & Córdova, 2012, p. 103). For this reason, citizen and community initiatives, commitment and actions to reverse language minorisation, community-based efforts, remain crucial to the normalization process, ensuring intergenerational language transmission and thus language vitality (Fishman, 1991, p. 82).

In Mexico community-based alternatives exist and are being realized and implemented by indigenous organizations, speakers, elementary school teachers and academics (see among others Flores [START_REF] Flores Farfán | Alternativas a la educación formal con lenguas amenazadas. Reflexiones, acciones y propuestas[END_REF][START_REF] Bertely | La construcción desde abajo de una nueva educación intercultural bilingüe para México[END_REF][START_REF] Avilés González | Du folklore à l'école indigène : ambigüités et alternatives. Dialogues et cultures : ''la scolarisation dans des langues sans tradition scolaire[END_REF]. In this vein, our work has focused particularly on Nahuatl, Otomanguean and Mayan languages up to now. Among other research activities we have developed the Native Literacy and Grammar Workshops (NLGW) based on a set of experimental projects, such as the Crossed Narratives and the Imaginary Homelands workshops. As we will see, the ethnomethodology applied in these workshops shows that the transition orality-literacyorality in indigenous languages is, and could be, flowing continuously during teaching activities. The Crossed Narratives workshop, whose aim is to uncover some of the cultural crossovers created by languages and cultures in contact, is one of the first steps towards a comprehensive method for using native languages in the classroom. The workshop entitled Imaginary Homelands broadens the scope going one step further towards modelling the forms and contents of native settings in articulation with universal settings. This workshop aims at generating teaching materials on local history and geography, with a critical position on the environmental and socio-economic issues the community might face today (cf. Solis & Solano, 2006;Lazos & Paré, 2000) or have faced in the past (e.g. [START_REF] Boege | Los mazatecos ante la nación[END_REF][START_REF] Mcmahon | The Impact of a Federal Dam on a Mexican Indian Community in the Papaloapam Basin, Catholic University of America[END_REF]. This kind of workshop results in the production of teaching materials with, for and by speakers of indigenous languages, but it also results in a certain type of reflexion with discussion on the pedagogical goals of BIE. Encouraging teachers to create and apply educational tools and programmes adjusted to local contexts, where the local languages have a crucial role, is also a way of articulating language policies and planning. Beyond the usual debate of general school contents versus specific community contents, the function of BIE in the communities thus becomes how to re-appropriate educational contents, promoting the very function of school in the way of Freire [START_REF] Freire | Educação como prática da liberdade[END_REF]. As such, we examine what contents school could be expected to provide as a vector of socialization for indigenous children and/or students. All these resources point towards an important insight for applied linguistics: linguistic planning leads to forms of emancipation or selfempowerment, reminding us of what Nelson Goodman called Ways of Worldmaking [START_REF] Goodman | Manières de faire des mondes[END_REF]. Moreover, these techniques rely strongly on community empowerment.

The methodology and reflexive attitude towards EBI implemented in these workshops has spread within networks of schoolteachers and educational institutions independently of the official policies coming from above. The training of schoolteachers in co-participative educational workshops on Crossed Narratives and Imaginary Homelands, as we will demonstrate in the next section, also implicates the sociolinguist in a wide array of situations in rural and urban schools, in close collaboration with the grass root organizations that endeavour to develop alternative ways of rehabilitating and revitalizing native Mexican languages, at the intersection of practices at both the macro and micro levels of society.

Atomism and divisionism as default language management

One of the problems with only the de jure recognition of linguistic rights, without sustained language planning, and especially without training schoolteachers and users in the theory and practice of the literate koinés (= local conventions of writing, more or less adopted by all) 2 of native languages, is that it leads to atomism within the general use of literacy, and divisionism at the micropolitical level (i.e. in bilingual or in "Indigenous Primary Schools"). We will take Mazatec as a concrete example here. Disputes over the standard variety, even in terms of codification only and strict localism (i.e. writing according to the Huautla or to the Jalapa spelling conventions), make any margin of discussion very tight.

The only model the schoolteachers have in common is the grammar of Spanish: they know how to conjugate verbs in Spanish, how to find the lexical root, and how many inflectional classesor conjugationsthere are. They have no idea how many tone classes there are in Mazatec, nor do they recognize the structure of stems and lexical roots, or how many inflectional classes of verbs there are, let alone be capable of explaining how inalienable nouns have inflectional patterns for subject possessive agreement isomorphic to the verb's inflectional paradigms (i.e. verbs are conjugated with the same suffixes or enclitics and tone patterns as possessed nouns). When, during literacy workshops, Mazatec schoolteachers present to their colleagues texts they have written in Mazatec intended for use in school, we uncover an embarrassing phenomenon: they are unable to read each other's writing. Either due to spelling, segmentation, or some other categorisation process, the reader is incapable of deciphering the text in front of him/her. In general, schoolteachers have few opportunities to read texts any longer than a few lines in Mazatec. The SEP (the Mexican Ministry of Education) textbooks, the official handbooks for various Mazatec koinés (such as Huautla, San Pedro, Jalapa de Díaz, San Miguel Soyaltepec), are hardly ever used for more than a couple of classes for writing odd words, usually in relation with objects, and without any strategic plan for additive bilingual education. Although the SEP textbooks are packed full of texts and exercises and despite their adequacy for the main diatopic varieties of Mazatec, as local koinés their impact is almost invisible. The main reason for this rejection is that they have been elaborated by a small and distant group of experts as standard tokens of what Bilingual & Intercultural Education should be, however the cultural and linguistic contents are so unspecific and irrelevant to local conditions, that the schoolteachers generally drop the book after only a few experimental classes. This phenomenon occurs, with its own linguistic specificities, in almost all the Mexican indigenous schools including Nahuatl and Tének communities.

In this context, understanding that the Mexican indigenous communities require more adequate materials adapted to current teaching needs, we asked ourselves the following question: how can we produce a method based on agency and self-empowerment for and with schoolteachers? The Native Literacy and Grammar Workshops (NLGW) answer this need as their sessions are open and adaptable to any Meso-American language: they gather together between ten and ninety speakers or users of one or more native languages 3 , for writing sessions of two to three days (or four to six half days), where the participants write, draw, translate, convert into didactic drills, and present their production.

Why should linguists work on "endangered" or "vulnerable" languages? First, because these languages are part of a wider repertory, which is ecologically profitable to the population: varieties of indigenous languages convey social links and pertain to the cohesion of the local society that risks being atomized by an inegalitarian economy.

Second, because it is an ethical commitment to his/her work, that a linguist, in describing any language, should provide the community at will with the data he/she has elicited locally. The publication of academic papers is one of the many ways to fulfil this prerequisite of restitution. Third, there is a demand at the local level. Fourth, we consider that ideological relativity applies to Language Planning (LP): LP as such is neither good nor bad, depending on the context and/or the phase that national construction is at. LP is good as a means, not as a finality per se. It belongs to a wider class of policies sustaining inner diversity in societies. Diglossy is no more a fatality than any other psychosocial construct, and as a relative context, embedded in space and time, it may be turned around like many other ideological schemes (Ninyoles, 1997): it may become as obsolete as any other moral convention (see Appiah 2010).

In the case of languages of the Lower Papaloapam, for example, there is a demand for a qualitative bilingual shift, i.e. to switch from subtractive to additive bilingualism, and this demand emerges from a well organized sector of the civil societythe schoolteachers. In this context, participation in the process of the shift, from subtractive to additive bilingualism, is a good opportunity for linguists to grasp in real time how language management works, as a social but also as a technical process. The Native Literacy and Grammar Workshops (NLGW) have allowed us to do just this by becoming a part of the process. We shall therefore, in the next section, look at how the ALMaz team manages to associate descriptive fieldwork with participation in local language planning, with that sector of the population desiring to engage in the bilingual shift process.

The ALMaz project as a complex practice

The work reported here and accomplished in the Mazatec region is associated with the ALMaz project (Atlas Lingüístico Mazateco): revisiting both Kirk's and Gudschinsky's data [START_REF] Kirk | Proto-Mazatec phonology[END_REF][START_REF] Gudschinsky | Mazatec dialect history[END_REF], eliciting cognate sets and lists of paradigms from verbal inflection (see Léonard & al. 2012), depositing databases and digital recordings of Mazatec dialects, and organizing voluntary sessions of literacy and grammar workshops for the schoolteachers, in coordination with government and nongovernment organisations.

The Native Literacy and Grammar Workshops (NLGW) produce on average a booklet of 30-60 pages of texts, lexical and grammatical data and didactic proposals, gathered within two or three days of participation. All the participants are directly involved: they write, translate, make lists of words and grammar rules, and propose pedagogical recommendations for the classroom in debate sessions with presentations by each group.

All texts, drawings, tables, figures, sketches and guidelines produced during the session are duly documented (digital photographs, video and audio file), and copied directly onto a computer or external hard drive, after the sessions. The materials are transcribed and ordered according to specific metafiles, within the EM2 operation in the EFL Labex, Paris. 4 The first step of the Native Literacy and Grammar Workshop is "Easy Grammar" creativity sessions. One example of these is the writing of prosopopeas, in which various groups of schoolteachers write the story of an animal or a thing, in various person subject agreements (I am a squirrel, I eat nuts and I climb trees; we are squirrels, we eat nuts and we climb trees, etc.). Everyone enjoys this drill, consisting of the description of an animal and its way of life, from a physical description to its actions and its habitat, and then changing the person subject, or the tense (in Mazatec, aspect rather than tense). This first step has always proved extremely productive for a soft approach to TAMV (Tense-Aspect-Mode-Voice) and argument agreement. In Mazatec, the verbal inflectional system being quite complex, the same short texts of 10-15 lines are converted from subject agreement first person singular to second person singular and first person plural inclusive or exclusive, then in the neutral aspect (i.e. present, or habitual), in the completive (remote past) and the incompletive (future), thereby producing seven versions of the same text, for three TAMV paradigms, and three persons. This very simple and modest exercise makes it possible to identify pronouns, verbal roots and stems, and basic processes for TAMV contrasts (especially prefixation, via preverbation, as far as Mazatec is concerned).

The second step of NLGW is called Imaginary Homelands and was inspired by Italo Calvino's Le Città Invisibili [START_REF] Calvino | Le città invisibili[END_REF]. The Italian writer fancied a book of tales describing invisible or imaginary cities, each one standing for an archetype of what symbols, death, life, memory or society may mean. The novel can be read not only as a book of tales, but rather as a theoretical essay on urbanism, of the metaphorical type. In the NLGW framework, groups of schoolteachers imagine both the worst and the best sides of a local dilemma, such as the water supply, pollution, migration, acculturation or language shift. One poster will describe the bright side, or brightest possible, while another set of texts and figures will project how the situation could worsen, or even end up out of control.

The former text is called the utopic version, the latter, the dystopic version. This task requires stylistic flexibility in the native language, as the writer will have to describe his or her community through a dialectic argument, between the best and the worst of a social or environmental issue. The aim of this exercise is to encourage reflexion on solidarity and sustainable development within the community. The texts, with their sketches and drills, are extremely dense constructs, expressed and analyzed in the native language, and based on challenges the local community faces every day. As a concrete example, in one of those pedagogical units (a utopic text, a dystopic version and a synthesis along with guidelines for the classroom), created in Jalapa de Díaz in august 2010, water (nandá) is the dilemma: in the utopic text, the author praises water for making everything beautiful and fresh all around. She imagines her town, Jalapa de Díaz, as being immersed in water (like Venise). It states that water flows down from the mountain and the caves to soak the land and feed the people. The image of rain and freshness is associated with the colour of the water from the nearby dam, and with the deepest layers beneath the earth: "you, dear well dwelling deep down inside the earth, as fresh and sweet as honey and milk". So the text goes: water is what unites all living creatures on earth, flowing downhill to quench the thirst of people, etc. This is the bright side of the story: the utopic version. In sharp contrast to this bucolic view, comes the dystopia: where there was plenty of water, now every single speck of earth is as dry as a stone. There is no place to wash or swim, no place to flee from the heat of the sun; no more waterfalls, no more merry streams flowing down from the hills across the fields; nothing glimmering and transparent anymore; no more wells to get water to drink.

All that remains has become dirty and dark because the people did not care enough for it.

The water has dried up, as have the lives of the people, under the burning sun. Causality has a name: people. One of the next steps for the discussion would be to find out who could have made such a thing happen to their own home town or village, why, how and when. Of course, the unfair economic distribution of resources and wealth is the main cause of this phenomenon, but the question is also about how the local community could reverse this victimisation and their own vulnerability, in order to achieve protagonism and selfgovernment. The chain of causality will be carefully studied following comments about the systematic degradation of the water supply in the municipality or in the neighbourhood.

For the teachers, the main function of the native language at school could well be that of an instrument of socio-political awareness and social criticism. Social sciences, such as history and geography should or could be taught in the language, using maps and sketches, encouraging pupils to interview elders to gather further information. The Commonality school (see Meyer & Maldonado, 2010;[START_REF] Maldonado Alvarado | Los indios en las aulas: Dinámica de dominación y resistencia en Oaxaca[END_REF], has undoubtedly made its way deep into the discourse and ideology of schoolteachers in the state of Oaxaca, probably through labour unions, such as the section 22. The Imaginary Homelands sessions have unexpected and encouraging results: schoolteachers dare to express their opinion more straightforwardly, they identify the plights and challenges their community is facing, and they find a way not only of saying it in their native language, but also of writing it and reading it over and over again. In these sessions, we also work on how to interact with the pupils when implementing this kind of pedagogy of the immersive typeas discourse and narratives switch to the native language, instead of Spanish, which would otherwise have been the only medium of communication. The classes taught with this method and the genuinely local texts and sketches become in fact sessions of consulta, i.e. participative democracy. Nevertheless, the success of the method is dependent on the motivation and the disposition of the schoolteachers. Although we cannot guarantee that the NLGW methods and tools are regularly used in actual school teaching by former workshop participants, we have been able to note concretely that NLGW has had an impact in Oaxaca, and more specifically in the Mazatec area, after three years of intensive cooperation with many organisations, both official and/or informal, during the period 2010-13. Many participants have repeated in their own school area the same process with colleagues, or pupils and/or their parents. Transmission of the methodology has entered into a chain, which also makes the methodology more flexible and creative.

During fieldwork realized in 2012, the ALMaz team contributed to the reinforcement of this chain by returning the materials collected to communities, but also by holding approximately ten sets of NLGW in the Mazatec and Nahuatl area. Among others, these were held in the San Jerónimo Tecóatl, Agua de Tinta and Tepetitlán communities, where children and monolingual indigenous language speakers participated. These speakers displayed different degrees of literacy (including illiteracy), which again shows that illiteracy is not necessarily a handicap for the creation of pedagogical materials (as it is so often conceived by language planners). The ethnomethodological approach applied in this workshop whereby the participants share their competence and knowledge implies therefore that oral competence in the indigenous language is the most precious skill for NLGW, raising the status of these languages to the same level as Spanish. Monolingual indigenous speakers are invited to think, imagine and talk about their community, in their indigenous language, whereas teachers write and contribute to recreate in situ these stories and their subsequent pedagogical materials. In Tepetitlán, for example, a Nahuatl schoolgirl overcame her fear of participating in school activities, by creating, telling and writing stories in her native language. In this way, through a community-based effort, NLGW contributes to the development of pedagogical contents adapted to sociolinguistic contexts, flowing in a continuum of orality-literacy-orality. This experience allows us to confirm that writing is not the goal, but rather a tool of language normalization, and that the "embarrassing phenomenon" encountered above must not become a handicap either.

The third step of NLGW involves narratives and mythology: the "Sol y Luna" (or "Sun and Moon") sessions. On the basis of a native version of the Meso-American Sol y Luna mythological motive, groups of schoolteachers write their own version of the tale in the local dialect or koiné. They also index concepts of cultural anthropology in the text they produce, in order to prepare a simultaneous critical analysis of the narrative by examining at what extent an ancient narrative may still be up to date, in so far as one can interpret its potential correlates with the world of today. The Sol y Luna myth works as a semiotic matrix: this story of two orphans born from a parrot's eggs, brother and sister, the Sun and the Moon, who are sheltered by an old witch whose lover is a forest deer, and who then become rebels and murder their father-in-law, is one of the best one can find to illustrate ordinary human fatea story of treachery and hardship, but also a kind of epic parody, full of paradoxes. The Sol y Luna sessions are planned as an exercise of hermeneutics, on the basis of narratives of the mythological genrethere is a partial crossover with the Crossed Narratives Workshop (see below). The grid, adapted from Boege (1998: 92-93), in the table below, works as an analytical tool that can be used to extract relevant information from any local narrative of the Sol y Luna type. If applied to such a text, the grid should be used when picking out themes related to solidarity networks and systems of regional geopolitics (in column A), and themes related to the ordering of group identity (in column B). Column A is then broken down into the intervening psychosocial factors relating to alliance networks. A1: primary prerequisites of loyalty, includes issues such as how people get access to land; how and with whom they marry (kinship relations); other types of kinship relations and compadrazgo (moral relations), which strengthen ties between allied families; and also the council of elders. The next section A2: social order prerequisites, includes the distribution of tasks between men and women or between any other sub-groups (i.e. functional distribution); the repartition of unpaid community work (tequio); and the patrilocal/matrilocal polarity related to dwelling and inheritance. Other efficient ways of controlling people and resources, after domestic power, have to do with either mastering social rituals, ordering time and space, being a member of a specific cast of elders or experienced people, or through violence, fear or guilt, or betrayal. The ordering of identity in column B can be divided up into cultural geography (B1) and systems of production (B2). The categories of this grid are applicable to a wide array of narratives, and can be converted into pedagogical tools for the teaching of the language or with the language, in accordance with the desire to switch from subtractive to additive bilingualism. In the workshop, all the categories of the table above are to be translated into the native language of the teachers, so that they can project these concepts onto their own version of the Sol y Luna tale. The conceptual output may be very different in the native language, but this is precisely the desired effect; it acts as a reflexive tool for intercultural debate. The goal of this activity is to engender an analytic attitude toward the contents of any narrative or native myth being used as a pedagogical tool in the classroom.

A. Alliances

We will take the Mazatec workshop session as a case-study, where the Sol y Luna myth was analysed. In section A1 the characters have variable access to the crop field (milpa), and there are lots of taboos and paradoxes connected to the primary prerequisites of loyalty (Moreno, 2008: p.35-60) as far as reproductive strength and the fertility of women are concerned: the orphans were born from two parrot eggs, coveted by two young girls, who abandon them to the stream. Even compadrazgo (moral ties) and the council of elders are subtly hinted at in the tale. As for social order prerequisites (A2), in the Mazatec version of Sol y Luna, matrilocality turns out to be a real dilemma, as the two orphans eventually leave the home of their mother-in-law, in order to live on their own in nature, before rising to the sky to become the Sun and the Moon. The handling of time, of rites and ceremonies, as well as violence, fear and guilt or treachery (as in the grid above), are among the tactics of the characters in the tale. As for A3 sociocultural analysis, reciprocity is omnipresent in this version, since revenge is the main motive of the protagonists. As for column B, the Mazatec version of the Sol y Luna tale is abundant with mythological geography or, better said, epic topology and etiology of hills, caves and springs. Most of the tale has to do with the Meso-American milpa system, composed of maize, beans, chilli and gourds: the tale mentions many symbolic details linked with rituals involved in the culture and processing of maize. In a different tale such as the story of the founding of the village, then section B2

Products, systems of production may contain more information for the colonial, or the commercial systems of production, such as coffee, sugar cane, or cattle. After explaining how this grid can be used, and after giving advice on a systematic translation of each concept of the Boege matrix, the writing session begins. Schoolteachers alone or with their pupils or even taking advice from parents attending the workshop, write the local version of the tale. Each group is asked to discuss how the concepts of the Boege matrix can be applied to the text it has just produced, and how they will prepare this material for school.

When presenting their work, in Mazatec (or other native language) and Spanish, each team makes a critical analysis of the paradoxes and situations met in the myth. This is one of the differences of this method from standard teaching methods where tradition implies folklore only and teaching is usually only done in Spanish. The Boege grid does not only make the process of identifying the key notions and facts within any text from the oral repertory of "folk literature": the mere task of translating these concepts into Mazatec, Nahuatl or Mixtec is already a reflexive challenge. Not only a terminological one: factors sustaining to the burden of stigma [START_REF] Goffman | Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity[END_REF] associated with indigenous languages rise to the surface in translation. The reason why the NLGW sessions start with Easy Grammar, and end with a phase that can be called "Difficult Myth", is due to the underlying complexity of the myth which could easily be lost if such a grid was not used.

As briefly mentioned earlier, the Difficult Myth module of NLGW is linked to another project on traditional tales entitled Crossed Narratives. Indeed, Soly y Luna or Difficult Myth was inspired by this initial project and so it finds its place within the NLGW project.

The Crossed Narratives project

As we suggested in the introduction, the Crossed Narratives workshop is one of the first steps towards a comprehensive method for using native languages in the classroom. This workshop is based on the premise that cultures in contact are influenced by or borrow from each other, and that these cultural mergers might be useful in the elaboration of genuine educational materials on and within the native languages used in the classroom.

It was implemented as an experimental project with schoolteachers in the region of Oaxaca The project concentrates on the diversity of sociolinguistic repertories and language contact, using narratives long or shortfrom riddles and proverbs to traditional tales and legends, myths and beliefsas vectors of corpus.

The workshop sessions unite speakers of one or more minority language, mastered at diverse degrees, who are incited to reproduce narratives of oral tradition, encouraged by lists of motives attested in the region (for example, see [START_REF] Peñalosa | El Cuento popular maya[END_REF] for Mayan narrative motives). The participants work in small groups each representing one language, or one language variant. There may be more groups representing Tének, for example, than Pame simply because there is a larger population of Tének speakers. One important point to clarify among the participants is the decision on whether to produce materials in the local variant of the learners or particular school they will be used in, or whether they should use an accepted "norm" (or whether both should be done). Each working group must make that decision according to what suits their specific situation and how and where they plan to use these materials. One of the advantages of this workshop module is its flexibility as a pedagogical tool. All too often we hear of contexts where the bilingual schoolteacher posted at the bilingual school is indeed bilingual, but simply not in the same indigenous language as the schoolchildren he/she has been sent to teach. The Crossed Narratives workshop allows the teacher to use his/her own cultural motives in order to create a link with those of the pupils. Even though the languages may be very different, the cultural motives may be similar, and these may be used as the basis for the creation of intercultural pedagogy. Each group receives a different list of narrative motives prepared in advance by the facilitator and identifies one belonging to the participants' repertory. The group prepares a poster representing the narrative selected in a written and/or drawn form and then prepares a list of proposals of educational activities related to this narrative. All is drawn and written in the indigenous language where possible, including the educational activities proposed. Each group then presents its text, illustrations and pedagogical recommendations before the assembly while being simultaneously recorded on film. The presentations are made first in the minority language then in Spanish for the other groups of variants/languages. The idea is that the original version is in the indigenous language and the Spanish version is a translation of this rather than the contrary.

In the case where the narrative is identified by the speaker of a different language or variant as also belonging to his/her repertory then this person is asked to orally recount this other version before the whole group again whilst being filmed. It may be the case that a number of versions of the narrative exist differing at varying degrees. The groups then selects another known motive from the list or switches lists with another group for another round of narratives.

The one aspect of these workshops that constantly holds the attention of the participants is the co-elaboration of pedagogical recommendations (or "pautas pedagógicas"). As mentioned briefly above, these are devised, discussed and developed group by group, then put to the general assembly following the presentation of the narrative, ultimately expressing how the contents of the texts and illustrations produced could be best put to use.

The same texts/illustrations may be used in various different ways according to the age or level of the learner concerned. It is necessary to be sure that the participants understand that we are talking about recommendations, options or possibilities rather than rules to be systematically applied. They usually find this idea quite disconcerting to begin with, and in every workshop, this is the activity that not only provokes the most interest, but also reveals the most gaps, requiring the most efforts in terms of debate, elaboration, and articulation. It involves constant research and reflexivity, taking into account differences between variants and adapting to the changes. [START_REF] Corcuff | Les nouvelles sociologies[END_REF] defines reflexivity as critical reflexion or constant rethinking of one's categories of analysis, and the adequacy of one's hypotheses and theories in continuous interaction with the context they define. At the start of this reflexion, the traditional pedagogical goals are given, such as "teaching reading and writing to young children", leading eventually onto "understanding the value of indigenous traditions"; then as the participants realize how powerful a tool they can themselves create and develop based upon this simple repertory of narratives, they become much more adventurous and may offer up recommendations pertaining to local geography, to botany, to biology and even to physics, sociology, or philosophy.

Another advantage of this type of workshop is the large quantities of texts produced over a short period of time as well as the oral/video recordings that serve to both document the workshops and the narratives heard within them and provide another educational tool.

Again, as in the case of every NLGW session, digital copies of everything produced are left with the participating communities. The work of several months of preparation of teaching material can be achieved within just a few days with the participation of a large group of teachers or trainers permanently in contact with the educational realities of the field, and with materials closer to the real needs of the learners. If the material is not directly publishable at the end of the workshops, it is at least recorded, filmed, photographed and digitalized, and can be revised, added to and eventually published without a great deal more effort. Widespread access to the internet now provides an easy and inexpensive means of publication and allows immediate (re)distribution of the work realized during the workshop sessions. The participants, in coordination with other local and regional teachers, can review and complete the materials. Year after year, they will be able to hold further writing workshops based on the same method in order to continue to develop and improve the materials produced.

In this particular case, however, as well as providing a methodology that can be re-applied in any native cultural setting, our objective is to encourage reflexion upon how and what they want to teach using their native language and to give them confidence in their ability to create new tools, thereby empowering the community itself. The aim of the workshops is not so much the production of schoolbooks as the development of a debate on what alternative pedagogy could be applied, encouraging reflexion or reflexivity (see [START_REF] Hervik | Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries: Social categories and Lived Identities in Yucatán[END_REF] for a discussion on the concept of reflexivity in relation with the Yucatec Maya). The workshops are in effect an invitation to think, consider and question the function of BIE in the communities and how to re-appropriate educational contents.

Three steps, from Easy Grammar to Difficult Myth: from complex to simple practice

Whereas complexity associates many objects on many coordinates and hierarchies, to reach the equilibrium of a system, simplicity makes packets of such systems in order to reach easy goals: the only thing that stops systems from becoming chaos is that simplicity has the final word over complexity. Even the application of the NLGW methodology can be described as a complex process, which has finally reached a simple articulation, across three basic components: Easy Grammar (EG), Imaginary Homelands (IH) & Difficult Myth (DM).

The three steps of NLGW (EG, IH & DM) are the result of nearly 15 years' practice, in the realm of literacy workshops in native languages of Meso-America, in Mexico and Guatemala. The first NLGW sessions were a little more awkward: we would ask for riddles, or for objective descriptions of the community, in order to teach history and geography with texts in the native language (see [START_REF] Léonard | Un projet de linguistique appliquée pour l'éducation multilingue maya (tseltal et tojolabal) autonomiste au Chiapas : Ti k'e' a ja swajich jamasa'i et Sbabial jwaychtik, ja jun ku'untik[END_REF]. Unfortunately, riddles turned out to foster only short range activities of vocabulary and spelling, while descriptions of communities often ended up being the copy of the official story, with no creative commitment from the schoolteachers themselves. Instead, the Imaginary Homelands and the Sol y Luna sessions open up access to a bewildering amount of fresh, critical and powerful narratives. They avoid routine, they challenge attitudes of resignation in the face of stigma, such as acceptation, victimisation, segregation (cf. Goffman, op. cit.), and they question essentialism, since the literary workshop protocol, with its dialectic method and its analytical grid of socio-cultural factors, compels the participants not to take anything for granted. NLGW has engineered a methodology for reflexive participative sessions of literacy in native languages. It is part of a wider attempt, by the IUF Meso-American project team, to make linguistic projects impact on language planning in situ, as a form of restitution to the population of speakers. The main goal of this component of the ALMaz project was to compensate for a serious deficit in the training of native schoolteachers: the lack of theory and practice of written Mazatec, Nahuatl, or Tének (among many others). Moreover, the NLGW methodology insists on formally training native schoolteachers in the analysis of their language, even as far as holding sessions of comparative phonology and dialectology (see [START_REF] Léonard | Enquêtes exploratoires pour l'ALMaz (Atlas Lingüístico Mazateco): Elicitation croisée, entre typologie et codification d'une langue otomangue[END_REF].

Conclusion

One of the striking results of the ALMaz project is that we are able to see that working at the grass-roots level with the appropriate protocol (NLGW), with funds allowing regular and frequent visits to the area by highly trained linguists or anthropologists to hold NLGW sessions, organise congresses and meetings on the future of bilingual and intercultural education, does make a difference, when compared with ordinary linguistic documentation and revitalization. In fact, language management does not require enormous amounts of funds to get started. The main prerequisite is to have a sector of the linguistic community desirable of a qualitative language shift, as we have already mentioned earlier: from subtractive to additive bilingualism. In this case, the gremio magisterial, or the Oaxacan schoolteachers are willing to participatein spite of much repression and humiliation (see Sotelo [START_REF] Sotelo Marbán | Oaxaca: insurgencia civil y terrorismo de estado, México:Era[END_REF]. The second prerequisite is the ability to find appropriate technical solutions to local dilemmas. Theoretical and descriptive linguistics have such tools. The third prerequisite adds one more constraint: the technical solution must be adopted by the community making the demand. It must not be paternalistic: it should rely on a shift in knowhow, from the linguist to the most advanced sector in native language literacy. How can the most active, but also the most distressed sector in terms of qualifications, regain a margin of action in Language Planning, if the participants do not have formal command of their native languages?

NLGW not only results in concrete, viable, authentic materials for educating children, but also results in the reflexivity so badly needed for the re-appropriation of the contents and in order to question the very function of bilingual intercultural education, thereby leading to the empowerment of the communities involved. One may question even the notion of school as an institution dedicated to the integration and education of children in order to shape the individual citizens of a nation; in order to shape free-thinking, responsible citizens who are well integrated at all the different levels of a multicultural society.

These workshop modules are polyvalent and multidisciplinary, adaptable to almost all situations where there are languages in contact. They enable the teaching of a language directly in the language concerned, and certain modules (Crossed Narratives; Difficult Myth) even rely on the contact between languages and cultures, thereby adding value to this contact.

In conclusion, Language Planning is simplest and most effective when it comprises the restitution of the functions and status of linguistic practices through the creativity, reflexivity, knowhow and agency of speakers.

Appendice

Utopic version (in Spanish) Dystopic version (in Spanish)

El lugar de las aguas El lugar de las abundantes aguas que bañas a la hermosa ciudad de Jalapa, la ciudad fresca y hermosa.

Tu cascada que bajas del cerro, brillosa y cristalina como perla hallada en las cuevas, que engalanas y llenas la ciudad de Jalapa. Y así todo ser vivo lo alimentas, lo refrescas como la brisa a la milpa.

Qué abundancia de agua, fría como el granizo que cae en el cielo azul para unirse con la presa.

Tu pozo que vives desde lo más profundo de Ahora, ya no hay agua.

El agua se fue muriendo así como también la gente: uno por uno, porque ya no había agua para tomar, y el sol (…) calentaba, y ya no había lluvia.

1 CMPIO (Coalición de Maestros y Promotores Indígenas de Oaxaca), EIBI network (Educación Indígena Bilingüe Intercultural), SEP (Secretaría de Educación Pública), CEDELIO (Centro de Estudios y Desarrollo de las Lenguas Indígenas de Oaxaca), ENBIO (Escuela Normal Bilingüe e Intercultural de Oaxaca), ENHP (Escuela Normal de la Huasteca Potosina).

2 These conventions are often the product of various sources, such as the S.I.L. Bible translations, local booklets of myths and tales published by government institutions, and the S.E.P's coursebooks in the local variety. They may beformalized into booklets of "normative language", such as Maximino Cerqueda García's ALFALEIM method for Highland Mazatec, in the Sierra Mazateca, readily available in any school library.

3 All the languages are processed in the IUF Meso-American project, through databases and research in descriptive and theoretical linguistics [START_REF] Léonard | Enquêtes exploratoires pour l'ALMaz (Atlas Lingüístico Mazateco): Elicitation croisée, entre typologie et codification d'une langue otomangue[END_REF]Léonard & al., 2012), and each member of the team has specific training in at least one of the languages: Jean Léo Léonard with Mazatec, Mixtec and Chinantec, Julie McCabe Gragnic with Tének, and Karla Janiré Avilés González with Nahuatl.

(

  speaking Mazatec, Zapotec and Mixe, among others) and in the Huasteca region in 2009 and 2010. Our aim was to apply this method in areas displaying a structural convergence of languages. The Huasteca region of central Mexico was the perfect place to start with three indigenous languages of three different families in contact; Nahuatl (a Uto-Aztec language), Tének (a Mayan language also known as Huastec/Wastek or Teenek) and Pame (or Northern Pame, of the Otomanguean family). Varying degrees of bilingualism/plurilingualism converge, featuring speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl, for example or Nahuatl and Tének, or all of the above.

  El lugar en donde había abundante agua. Agua que se encontraba en cualquier espacio, y dondequiera uno caminaba, encontraba agua para bañarse la gente y para tomar. Ahora ya no hay agua ¿Porqué se ha secado? El agua donde algún día los niños y las personas se bañaban. Hoy ya no hay agua para bañarse. Ya no hay arroyuelos donde pasan por los montes y por las milpas. Las cascadas desaparecieron. Las cascadas que bajaban como cristalinas ya no existen. ¿Porque no existen los pozos donde se la tierra, fresca y dulce como la miel y la leche, sacias la sed del mazateco que no sufre ni muere por que tu lo alimentas, así como al cerdo le gusta el charco. Tu arroyuelo que bajas de las montañas cruzando ríos y montes acariciando y regalando amor a chicos y grandes. Así como tú laguna, que eres amador de todos y que haces de tu casa cualquier espacio que encuentras para contemplarte la gente. agua es negra? El agua se ha secado porque la gente no la supo cuidar, y no supo valorar lo que tenia.

. Social Order Prerequisites 2. Products, systems of production

	Violence, fear and guilt	Fishery and Hunting
	Betrayal		Food processing
	3. Transactions and Systems of exchange
	Reciprocity
	Market	(solidarity networks)	B. Identity
	1. Primary prerequisites of loyalty Source: from Boege, Eckart 1988: p.92-93, adapted. 1. Cultural geography
	Access to land	Toponymy
			Sacred or Holy Places
	Kinship relations	Handling of Natural Elements
	Compadrazgo	Discourse about Origins (Etiology)
	Council of the Elders
	2Functional Distribution	Maize
	(Collective Work, Labour Redistribution)
	Patrilocality		Milpa
	Matrilocality		Coffee
	Handling of Time (Calendar)	Sugar Cane
	Handling of Rites and Ceremonies	Cattle

  Nde mitatjin ntó ko tufi tufi ti'mje xuta taa nubó tuxi in sje ko in tsi'chhjan ná taa mita ba'a tsi'.

	xinkuu nta chiki, xi batsín tsjoo xuta xinkuu
	chinko ntá si. Ji nta xunka xi tibitjanki
	tibitjame kinte naxi ko xi tinibajen ijin
	Metadata: ñjachó ko ijin nju xi tibee ngaye nganti nga
	Archivo de origen: MAZATECO_TALLER_JALAPA_2010. Video: SDV_0649. Unidad sti xi ti tsuntonjiin batjin.
	didáctica: Comunidades Invisibles. Módulo textual: Textos para las clases: Nankii ntá kijuo Ko xintuu ko ji nta tinchantí xi mji chjii yjee
	("El lugar de las aguas"). Participantes: Profa. Silvia Carrera Olivera. Fecha: Agosto 04, tu ma nemani ni'yee, nkja basenkjin xuta.
	2010. Lugar: EBI-Jalapa, Sección/Zona 055, Jalapa de Díaz, Oaxaca, México. Facilitador:
	Jean Léo Léonard. Recopilado por Karla Janiré Avilés, Labex EFL axe 7, EM2, 2011.
	Utopic version (in Mazatec)	Dystopic version (in Mazatec)
	Nankii ntá nijuo
	Nankii ntá nijuo nkuu nte má tuxi tsjo tsi
	tjín ntá nijuo xi nenguye tente ´nankí
	tsjotjin, nanki skjian xi tuxí tsjootjín.
	Jintá naxi xi tí nibajen nja', nja´, xinkúu	Tonga nde ja mita tjin nixi ba'mi ntá nijuo
	ndjio nja' xi tjin tixa naxi nkjún.	á ja kixiya ntá nijua má nku nistjin kjia
		tsinguya ntixi nde já mitatjin má
	Kuixi tsitse su sun ngayje nanki ntá xjo, taa	kuinguyaaná ko ntá xunka xi fanki fa'ma
	ngayje chu, xuta, ko ngayje nixi tjín batenta	ijin nju ko ntá naxi xi nibajen xinkúu nku
	nchán ko ti nakjen. Xinkuu nku tsi'xa xi	tsi'xa á ja mitatjin ntá xi mangujinko
	tsi'kjen nju.	ntáje.
	Abatsjo tsi tjín ntá nijuo, nchán xinkuu tsi	Ámita tjin ntá tixa xi siina xi batsin nchan
	'ndjio xi bixuntu nkjia ba' tsi'ndjio xi	xinkúu tsindjo ko ntá finchantí xi tjin kue?
	nibaara ndjio mjiján, as'ie mangujin ko nta
	tinchantí.	Mi'kjuaa tu ntá ye' kumaa ntá nijuo
		mikjua kixiyaa ntó ataa mi kumaa
	Nta tixa xi tinchaya kintee 'ta nanki xi 'fi	kuakuntá xuta ko mi kumaa kikun nixi
		kisee.

xutandaxjo ábandara ataa m'i ti'me kjintiá, kataa nta nijuo xi batsín i xinkuu nsjen ko Nanki xi nku nistjin kikin nanki ntá ; nku nanki xi mánga kixinchantu ntá nijua tu mámjera ko tu má kjin'ná sakúna ntá nijua xi binguya xuta ko ntá nijua xi'fi.

For information on operation EM2, Labex EFL, strand 7 (Jean Léo Léonard & Karla Janiré Avilés González), see http://axe7.labex-efl.org/em2-description and http://axe7.labex-efl.org/em2_bilan (Thanks go to Labex EFL, operation EM2 and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) for their financial support).


Pierre Wargnier

Adrien Malaisé

Julien Jacquemot

Samuel Benveniste

Pierre Jouvelot

Maribel Pino

Anne-Sophie Rigaud

Adrien Malais

Towards Attention Monitoring of Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment During Interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent

Keywords: Embodied conversational agents, assistive technologies, attention estimation, dementia Index I.5.5 [Implementation]: Interactive systems; K.4.2 [Social Issues]: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities-Handicapped persons/special needs

published or not. The documents may come

INTRODUCTION

Due to the increase in the number of people living with dementia, usually caused by Alzheimer's disease, and growing caregiver shortage, assistive technologies will become critical in dementia care. Effective assistive devices will be key to help people living with dementia stay at home for as long as possible, and to enable caregivers to deliver higher quality care to an ever larger target population with highly constrained resources. The World Health Organization predicted that the number of people living with dementia, worldwide, will exceed 100 million by 2050 [START_REF]Dementia: a public health priority[END_REF], making it a public health priority.

Assistive technologies for older adults, in particular those living with dementia, are often computer-based. But while their functional capabilities are getting better thanks to very fast technological improvement, people with dementia and their caregivers still do not use them very much. Indeed, the two main factors influencing the real-world effectiveness of these systems are their usability and acceptance, the later of which is highly related to perceived usefulness. The user interface should thus be adapted to the person's special needs for the product to be both easy to use and enjoyable. * e-mail:pierre.wargnier@mines-paristech.fr

The overall goal of our project is to develop a computer user interface for older adults with cognitive impairment based on an embodied conversational agent (ECA), called Louise, in order to make assistive technology's use more accessible to them. If dementias are usually associated with memory impairment, they also cause executive and attentional disorders [START_REF] Lapointe | How to maximize the effectiveness of prompts in assistive technologies according to the particular cognitive profile of people with alzheimer[END_REF], which come in addition to the diminution of attentional capabilities observed in normal aging [START_REF] Fisk | Designing for Older Adults: Principles and Creative Human Factors Approaches[END_REF]. These specific constraints call for a user-centric design approach.

To develop Louise, we adopted a co-design methodology, involving the target users and other stakeholders (mostly care professionals and the patients' helpers), following a living lab methodology [START_REF] Bergvall-Kareborn | Living lab: an open and citizen-centric approach for innovation[END_REF][START_REF] Agogué | Managing innovative design within the health ecosystem: the living lab as an architect of the unknown[END_REF]. It is based on five basic principles:

Openness. The conception process is public and anyone considering himself or herself impacted can get involved.

Influence. All participants should have a balanced influence on the design. Once people were involved their opinion has to impact the design based on their importance regarding the product's deployment.

Reality. The conception and evaluation of the solution should be performed as ecologically as possible.

Value creation. The design process should create value for everyone involved, not only from an economic perspective but also at the social level.

Sustainability.

Once developed, the solution should keep evolving and being re-evaluated thanks to new data from the field.

In sync with the principles of the co-design methodology, an evaluation must be performed at every stage of the life-cycle of the ECA-based solution.

Based on the experience of our team1 in the evaluation of assistive technologies, we identified that maintaining the user's attention during the interaction with any assistive device is critical. By "attention", we mean the ability one has to focus on a specific stimulus or task. In prior assistive technology trials conducted with patients with dementia, we noticed that the experimenters kept redirecting the participants' attention towards the task that they had to complete.

In this paper, we thus focus on the first step of the iterative design process of Louise, in which we address the issue of attention monitoring. At this point, Louise is able to compensate, through an attention monitoring algorithm we developed, for a user's attentional disorders by performing autonomous prompting, i.e., using its synthetic voice to call the user to regain and redirect his or her attention in case he or she got distracted. Our prototype is a semiautomatic ECA that uses (1) a Microsoft Kinect sensor and the associated software development kit (SDK) for user tracking, (2) the Unreal Engine game engine for ECA character animation and [START_REF] Asteriadis | Visual focus of attention in non-calibrated environments using gaze estimation[END_REF] the Cerevoice text-to-speech synthesizer. Louise's simple attention estimation implementation turns out to be more than 80% accurate, and the overall system got quite positive reviews from users.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present similar attempts and results from the literature that suggest the use of an ECA is a promising solution for assistive device-user interaction; in addition, we survey some of the literature on automatic monitoring of attention. Section 3 contains design and implementation details regarding the attention monitoring algorithm we developed for our prototype, Louise. In Section 4, we present an experimental evaluation of our attention management system with a group of experts in assistive technologies. Section 5 focuses on the design recommendations collected from assistive technology experts. In the last section, a conclusion and future work perspectives are presented.

RELATED WORK

Though the field of social computing devices has grown very fast in the past decade, a lot of research remains to be done about their use with cognitively impaired older adults. Attention monitoring, on the other hand, is linked to the wider field of user engagement in Human-machine interaction. In this related work section, we first review the potential applications of ECAs in elderly care and show why researchers think they are promising. Then, we present the research related to attention monitoring.

Embodied Conversational Agents in Elderly Care

Several authors have studied the use of ECAs with cognitively impaired older adults. Ortiz et al. [START_REF] Ortiz | Elderly users in ambient intelligence: Does an avatar improve the interaction[END_REF] have performed an empirical study involving 3 groups, of 5 people each, with different levels of cognitive capabilities: normally aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD). They compared a virtual character with text accompanied with speech and text only. They found that the users in all groups performed significantly better when guided by the virtual character instead of other prompting modalities. They also observed that the virtual character was judged pleasant by the study participants.

Morandell et al. [START_REF] Morandell | Avatars in assistive homes for the elderly[END_REF] evaluated the use of photographs on which the lips are animated with 10 cognitively impaired older adults. They tested it for likability, task performance, and attentioncatching, comparing with a speech and text prompt. They found that the interface with the talking face was preferred, that it was linked to slightly better task performance for the most cognitively impaired participant, and that the users' attention was better maintained with the talking face than without it. In addition, the authors observed better understanding of the talking face than the disembodied voice. Similar results were observed in another study by the same team, involving 12 cognitively healthy older adults and 12 patients with MCI [START_REF] Morandell | Avatars@home[END_REF]. This later study was more focused on usability. MCI users performed as well as non-MCI users when interacting with a conversational agent, which shows the promise of ECAs for cognitively impaired older adults.

Carrasco et al. [START_REF] Carrasco | Natural interaction between avatars and persons with alzheimer's disease[END_REF] proposed a system in which a female virtual character is rendered on a TV set. The interaction with the user is done by hitting keys on the remote control, a familiar object for the elderly. They conducted a validation trial with 21 persons with AD. They showed that all participants understood well the character and successfully interacted with her. They also found that all participants engaged well and that the human-like character led them to interact naturally (using verbal and non-verbal communication) even though the conversational agent was unable to process such inputs. In a study using the same interactive system, Diaz-Orueta et al. studied the influence of the user's level of cognitive impairment, called cognitive status, on user interaction with the device. They concluded that cognitive assessment tests could guide the assistive device design, by taking into account the user's cognitive status [START_REF] Diaz-Orueta | Role of cognitive and functional performance in the interactions between elderly people with cognitive decline and an avatar on TV[END_REF]. More specifically, the measure of attentional capabilities and processing speed through cognitive assessment tests can bring useful information for a personalization of such a user interface. In [START_REF] Lapointe | How to maximize the effectiveness of prompts in assistive technologies according to the particular cognitive profile of people with alzheimer[END_REF], the authors have proposed to adapt the prompting modalities to the person's cognitive and perceptive abilities.

Recently, some ECAs using natural verbal and non-verbal interaction have been proposed for the assistance of older adults with cognitive impairment. In [START_REF] Sakai | Listener agent for elderly people with dementia[END_REF], Sakai et al. present a listener ECA that includes speech input processing and non-verbal feedback for people with dementia. In [START_REF] Huang | Toward a memory assistant companion for the individuals with mild memory impairment[END_REF], Huang et al. propose to enrich the interaction with this ECA by using a life-logging system. This software was used in [START_REF] Nonaka | Towards assessing the communication responsiveness of people with dementia[END_REF] for a preliminary study towards automatic monitoring of patients' with dementia evolution by assessing their conversational responsiveness to the ECA. An ECA for people living with dementia has also been developed by Yasuda et al. [START_REF] Yasuda | Development of an agent system for conversing with individuals with dementia[END_REF]. Their system differs by the appearance of the virtual character, which is based on a five-year-old child. An evaluation was conducted with 8 participants, all having Alzheimer's disease. The results show that the participants uttered 74% as many syllables when conversing with the virtual kid as when conversing with a human partner (26% less). In [START_REF] Wilks | CALONIS: An artificial companion within a smart home for the care of cognitively impaired patients[END_REF], Wilkis et al. have tested a prototype ECA, which includes speech recognition and emotional state estimation, for smart home applications with a brain-injured veteran. The test resulted in good communication with the test patient.

All these studies all show good appreciation of ECAs by AD or MCI patients. In addition, encouraging results in terms of task performance were found. This, as well as the fact that the human appearance of the virtual agents arouses natural communication in the user, makes us think that ECAs are a good solution for user interaction with assistive devices and cognitive prosthesis. However, there still are a lot of open questions regarding the designs of adapted ECAs for AD or MCI patients. Namely, the behavior of the character, the input and output modalities, the presentation of information and the automatic management of user engagement with the ECA still have to be investigated in depth. On this last subject, to the best of our knowledge, no work has specifically focused on attention management or user engagement in the specific case of people with dementia in interaction with ECAs. In the following section, we present some of the literature on engagement estimation in human-machine interaction.

Engagement in Human-Machine Interaction

Engagement was defined by Sidner et al. as "the process by which interactors start, maintain and end their perceived connection to each other during an interaction." [START_REF] Sidner | Explorations in engagement for humans and robots[END_REF]. Thus, engagement includes the attention and interest that a person pays to the interaction in which he or she participates. It is important during the communication to observe and to analyze the behavior of other participants in order to assess their engagement. By vocal or visual prompting, it is possible to bring back the attention of an interlocutor in the conversation [START_REF] Ishii | Gaze awareness in conversational agents: Estimating a user's conversational engagement from eye gaze[END_REF]. The engagement recognition, in the context of an interaction with an ECA, allows to show to the user that the system analyses and understands his behavior. Sidner et al. showed in [START_REF] Sidner | Explorations in engagement for humans and robots[END_REF] that a robot or an ECA performing engagement behaviors could more easily mobilize the user's attention.

The visual focus of attention is an important source of information regarding engagement [START_REF] Asteriadis | The importance of eye gaze and head pose to estimating levels of attention[END_REF]. This information can be measured by the estimation of someone's gaze or face orientation. Several studies show how to determine the face's orientation to estimate the focus of attention in several contexts: in front of a computer screen [START_REF] Asteriadis | Visual focus of attention in non-calibrated environments using gaze estimation[END_REF], in interaction with an ECA [START_REF] Ishii | Gaze awareness in conversational agents: Estimating a user's conversational engagement from eye gaze[END_REF][START_REF] Chen | Towards improving social communication skills with multimodal sensory information[END_REF] or a mobile robot [START_REF] Stricker | Realtime user attention and emotion estimation on a mobile robot[END_REF][START_REF] Benkaouar | Multi-sensors engagement detection with a robot companion in a home environment[END_REF]. In [START_REF] Li | Attention-based addressee selection for service and social robots to interact with multiple persons[END_REF], the user's attention is estimated using several features: po-sition and posture, face orientation, proximity from the system and smile detection. These features are combined to compute his or her attention level. In [START_REF] Stricker | Realtime user attention and emotion estimation on a mobile robot[END_REF], the focus of attention is estimated using the mean face orientation over the t last images. Engagement is evaluated by analyzing backchannel behaviors, which correspond to actions realized during an interaction, like head nods or nonverbal vocal behaviors. In [START_REF] Vinciarelli | Bridging the gap between social animal and unsocial machine: A survey of social signal processing[END_REF], the authors also stress that such backchannels are an important source of information to estimate user engagement. In [START_REF] Benkaouar | Multi-sensors engagement detection with a robot companion in a home environment[END_REF], engagement, that the authors define as the intention to interact, is estimated with the help of a Microsoft Kinect sensor. They show that only 7 features are sufficient: the relative orientation of the body and shoulders, distance from the sensor's plane, the speed on the axis parallel to the sensor plane, the size of the head seen by the sensor, the x position of the head in the color image produced by the sensor, the activated sound beams and the sound source localization angle.

ATTENTION MONITORING USING THE LOUISE ECA

In this section, the implementation of attention monitoring in our ECA is presented. The current prototype of Louise is a semiautomatic system that allows to animate a female cartoon-like character called Louise, represented on Figure 1, and synthesize voice from text. The character only moves in an idle pose and moves its lips when speaking. The system includes attention monitoring and interaction management based on a pre-defined script and keyboard inputs of a (presumably hidden) operator. Such a semi-automatic approach is well suited for rapid design prototyping and scenario screening, before embarking on the development of an automatic full-fledged system.

System Description

The current Louise prototype is built from three software modules: Interaction manager. An interaction management module has been developed. It takes a dialog script as an input and uses the attention estimation states as well as keyboard inputs to determine the next utterance to be produced in a semiautomatic way. The scenario is composed mostly of yes/no questions and an operator presses the corresponding key depending on the user's answer to trigger the next utterance.

When the person interacting with the ECA is considered distracted by the attention estimator, a prompt to regain his or her attention is triggered. The character stays in prompting mode until the attention of the user is detected again.

Behavior realizer. A behavior realizer has also been implemented, using the Unreal Engine game engine, coupled with the Cerevoice text-to-speech voice synthesizer. This module animates the virtual female character and produces vocal messages with synchronized lips animations.

The modules communicate as illustrated on Figure 2. The arrows stand for data exchanges. Note that the interaction manager requires feedback from the behavior realizer, mostly to know when the previous utterance is over. The system is, for the time being, semi-automatic. It takes, as input, a restrictive interaction scenario, composed of an introduction, several yes/no questions, backchannel utterances, prompting sentences, a transition question and a conclusion. The interaction starts by the introduction. Then, for each question, a key has to be pressed (Y for yes, N for no) to trigger a backchannel behavior and go on to the next question. The backchannel and prompting utterances are randomly selected from the corresponding lists. If the attentional state changes from focused to distracted, the ongoing behavior is automatically interrupted and a prompt behavior is produced. Once the user is considered by the attention estimator as attentive again, the transition question is asked. If the person wishes to continue the interaction, the last unanswered question is asked (again). If not, it jumps directly to the conclusion. When the character has gone through all the questions, the conclusion is triggered and the interaction ends. Lastly, if no user is tracked, the interaction cannot start and, if the user leaves, the character stops talking.

Attention Monitoring Algorithm

Older adults with cognitive impairment can be easily distracted by an external stimulus. Thus, the interaction between them and the ECA could be interrupted. We want to determine automatically if a person wants to communicate, and also if he or she remains attentive during the interaction. We implemented a method to estimate a person's attention, which is an important source of information in engagement (see Section 2.2). During an interaction, a person naturally faces his or her interlocutor to communicate with him or her. This is why we extract the posture of the user, and his or her face orientation, to estimate the level of attention he or she pays to the ECA. Our method is inspired by the works of Stricker et al. With the Kinect, a 20-point skeleton tracking is obtained, which allows to identify the user's upper-body pose. We extract the 3D position of the right and left shoulders to estimate if the person faces the ECA (see Figure 3 for notation). This method assumes that the sensor is placed in alignment with the ECA's display.

The azimuth of the user is defined as θ = arctan(N x /N z ) and the angle of the upper-body α as

α = arcos( N z -SL z (SL x -N x ) 2 + (SL z -N z ) 2 ) -90. ( 1
)
The posture feature f 1 is thus, at each time t:

f 1 = ϕ = α -θ . ( 2
)
In addition to the posture, we use the face tracking data of the Kinect for Windows SDK to obtain the face orientation of the user. The Kinect outputs, in real time t, the three rotations of the head: pitch γ pitch (t), yaw γ yaw (t) and roll. Only the two first parameters are used in our system. In order to improve reliability of the face orientation estimation from the sensor, we compute the mean of each measure over the last T =30 frames, which correspond to about one second, given the sensor's sample frequency (see Equations 3 and 4); such a value is relevant in the context of natural interaction. This approach produces stable input values f 2 and f 3 for the attention monitoring algorithm at each time t, even if the face tracker fails for a few frames:

f 2 = yawMean = 1 T t ∑ k=t-T +1 γ yaw (k), (3)
f 3 = pitchMean = 1 T t ∑ k=t-T +1 γ pitch (k). (4)
The three features f j ( j = 1, 2, 3) are normalized as f j in the same way:

f j = cos( f j ) -cos(Max j ) 1 -cos(Max j ) , (5)
where Max j represents the maximum value for each feature f j . They correspond to the Kinect's tracking limitations (30 • for yaw, 20 • for pitch and 60 • for upper-body pose).

A sum of the n = 3 normalized features f j , weighted by coefficients ω j (see Equation 6), is computed to assess the AttentionLevel at each time. The face's horizontal rotation has the most important weight to account for the importance of the face orientation in the attention estimation. This corresponds to using this information as a proxy to the user's gaze direction. For normalization purposes, the sum of the weights is equal to 10:

AttentionLevel = n ∑ j=0 ω j f j . (6)
The obtained attention level values range from 0 to 10, 10 being the maximum level, when the user's body and face are directly oriented towards the sensor. These values are then used to decide the user's attentional state.

There are four attentional states: NoUser, when no user is detected; UserDetected, when a user is detected for the first time and not considered attentive; AttentionAcquired, when the user is focused on the screen; AttentionLost, when the user is not focused anymore. Only some transitions between states are allowed:

• from NoUser to UserDetected;

• from UserDetected to AttentionAcquired;

• between AttentionAcquired and AttentionLost;

• from any other state to NoUser.

The transition rule uses two thresholds, a high and a low threshold, like a hysteresis system. The AttentionLevel value has to reach the high threshold for current state to change from UserDetected or At-tentionLost to AttentionAcquired. The transition from AttentionAcquired to AttentionLost occurs when the low threshold is reached. This choice avoids the occurrence of some fluctuations between two states, which could possibly occur if a single threshold was used. Moreover, it allows considering as engaged a person who pays real attention to the ECA and considering the user disengaged in case of an important decrease of his or her measured AttentionLevel. During our experiments we set the high threshold to 8 and the low one to 6.

ATTENTION MONITORING ALGORITHM VALIDATION

To validate our attention estimation algorithm before its integration in an automatic system and according to co-design principles, we conducted a semi-automatic "Wizard-of-Oz" experiment at the Broca hospital in Paris with members of our research team and outside experts. The sample was composed of 14 participants (4 men and 10 women), naive to the goal of the experiment, specialists in assistive technologies for older adults or care professionals (medical doctors and neuropsychologists, mostly). In this section, we first describe the test protocol and then present the evaluation results. We discuss experts' recommendations in Section 5.

Experimental Protocol

In this first experiment, the participants were seated about two meters from a 46-inch screen on which Louise, our virtual character, presented on Figure 1, was displayed in full screen, standing in the middle of the display. The Kinect sensor was placed, centered, on top of the screen. An experimenter was in the room with the participant, outside of the field of view of the Kinect sensor, behind a control screen, to discreetly press the keys corresponding to the answers given by the participant (Y key for yes, N key for no). All experiment sessions were recorded by logging the tracking data, the computed features, the attentional states, and the color image produced by the sensor. In addition, a camera was placed behind the participant, filming the screen and recording the sound. A sample was recorded every second.

The interaction consisted of 3 utterances for the introduction, 7 questions, 4 backchannel utterances, 3 prompting utterances and 2 utterances for the conclusion. During the interaction, two distractions were voluntarily introduced at fixed moments. The first one was introduced by the experimenter in the room at the beginning of the third introduction utterance: he asked the participant if the sound was loud enough. The second distraction was introduced by another experimenter, opening the room's door and asking the participant if everything was fine, during the fifth question.

All recorded data was, later on, manually annotated by two specialists, using the videos taken from the Kinect and the camera. The annotations consisted of the observed attentional states of the participants. They were then used as ground truths to compare with the decisions taken by the system. When the two annotations did not match, a third annotator decided which was right.

After the interaction with the ECA, a satisfaction questionnaire was administered to collect the participants' expert opinions about Louise's design. Their feedbacks are discussed in Section 5. The following subsection presents a performance evaluation of the attention estimator.

Results

All participants interacted naturally with the ECA. Most displayed high levels of attention. For some users the experimenter introducing the second distraction had to insist to distract the participant. This shows that the ECA is significantly engaging. The interaction lasted between 2 minutes 18 seconds and 5 minutes 16 seconds.

To evaluate the performance of the attention estimator, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was computed for several threshold values, ranging from 0 to 10 with a step of 0.5. The obtained curve is presented on Figure 4. The area under the ROC curve is about 0.8, which indicates that our algorithm is a quite good classifier. With the two attention level thresholds set to 8 for the high value and 6 for the low one, we obtained an accuracy of 82.78%. This could be slightly improved by setting the high threshold to 8.5. As already mentioned, using two decision thresholds is good to limit the amount of false positives when the user is not attentive to the ECA and reduces the number of false negatives when the user is considered engaged in the interaction, which could produce undesirable interruptions. Overall, whenever people disengaged from the interaction, the avatar stopped talking with little latency. The system failed intermittently with only one participant. In this particular instance, the Kinect's face tracker was unable to recognize her face properly and tracked instead her hair, which was curly and tied on top of her head in a big bun. The Kinect's face tracker is one of the main limitations of our system as it fails when the user turns his or her head more than 60 • from the normal to the sensor.

1-specificity

DISCUSSION

During the experiment described in Section 4, we asked our participants, who were assistive technology experts, for feedback. After they had interacted with the virtual agent, we gave them a 5questions questionnaire with lots of freedom for observations during an open interview. The questions were about how clear the questions asked by the character during the interaction were, how much (on a 1-to-4 scale) they liked the character's behavior, how they felt during the interaction, if they think the character reacted well to their behavior and whether the length of the interaction was appropriate.

For the first question about understandability, 10 out of 14 participants thought it was clear enough, 2 did not answer and 2 said no. One of them commented that it would turn out to be probably too complicated for cognitively impaired older adults.

Regarding likability, 5 participants appreciated the character a lot, 6 thought it was alright and 2 said it was not good enough. Most of the ones who said it was alright or not good enough commented that the lack of facial expression and blinking made them feel uneasy. In addition, one participant advised us to add directed gaze to show engagement on the character's side. Finally, several participants thought that Louise should smile.

As far as the third question about mood is concerned, all participants felt the interaction interesting (6) or very interesting [START_REF] Chen | Towards improving social communication skills with multimodal sensory information[END_REF]. No additional comments were given.

Question 4, regarding how the character adapted her behavior to their's, got more divergent opinions. 6 of them judged it reacted very well, while 3 said it was fine and 4 considered it a bit poor.

Lastly, 7 participants thought the duration of the interaction was adapted, 4 said it was too short and the last 2 didn't have an opinion.

Globally, as can be seen, the feedbacks were positive. The main improvement points that were raised were about the animation of the character's face and reactivity to their behaviors.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

In this article, we presented a first prototype of Louise, an ECA targeting older adults with dementia. The proposed system is currently centered on the key issue of attention management. A new attention estimator was developed, tested with assistive technology experts and validated; we found good accuracy in attention estimation. In addition, we gathered feedbacks from experts that turned out to be rather positive. The main limitations we could identify are linked to the system tracking capabilities, to improve the attention estimator, and the character's animation, linked to user experience.

As future work, we are currently in the planning phase for running the same experiment with dementia patients to further validate the attention estimation method and obtain useful data on how they interact with the ECA. So far, we have performed an informal trial with one patient from the Broca hospital; she seemed to engage well with the character, but we could not record the data. Thus, experimentations with the target user group are clearly required.

With the gathered data, we will be able to work on the two axes of improvement we identified: character animation and robustness of attention estimation to tracking failures. A new prototype with a better animation system is already under development. Lastly, we have to collect information about older adults' preferences regarding the appearance and animation of the ECA, what applications they would like it to be included into and under what conditions they would accept such a system in their homes.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Louise, our virtual character

  Attention estimator. A Microsoft Kinect sensor (version 1) and the Kinect for Windows software development kit (SDK) version 1.8 are used to track a user, compute an attention estimation value from the tracking data, and decide the user's attentional state, as detailed in Section 3.2.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Functional diagram of the Louise ECA prototype

  [START_REF] Stricker | Realtime user attention and emotion estimation on a mobile robot[END_REF], Benkaouar et al.[START_REF] Benkaouar | Multi-sensors engagement detection with a robot companion in a home environment[END_REF] and Li et al.[START_REF] Li | Attention-based addressee selection for service and social robots to interact with multiple persons[END_REF]. We use the Microsoft's Kinect sensor and Kinect for Windows SDK to extract tracking data of the user's posture and position.

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Estimation of the angle ϕ between the shoulder line and the Kinect sensor. θ is the angular position of the user, SR the position of the right shoulder, SL the position of the left shoulder, and N the position of the neck (calculated as the center of the vector [SR, SL]).

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: ROC curve of the attention estimator.

The Louise project is hosted at the Broca Hospital in Paris, in the LUSAGE Living Lab[START_REF] Pino | User-driven innovation for dementia care in france: The lusage living lab case study[END_REF].

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by a grant from Région Ile-de-France.