Liberté, by Gretchen Angelo, is a first-year college French textbook with a true communicative approach. It is currently being used at California State University, Los Angeles, Mount San Antonio College, and Santiago Canyon College. Please note that the downloadable version is a draft, and that the author continues to expand and modify the text.
The text can be downloaded in Adobe Acrobat format, and is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
To get the student copy of the book, click (or right-click, depending on your computer) on one of the links below to download it and save it to disk. These are large Adobe Acrobat files (11 Mb for the complete book), and may take about 40-60 minutes to download if you have a dial-up connection. If you are a Cal State LA student, you can download just the (smaller) portion you need. You will need the free Adobe Reader software, which comes preinstalled on most computers.
Student edition:
- entire book
- French 100A - chapters 1 - 4
- French 100B - chapters 5 - 8
- French 100C - chapter 9 (for now)
Instructor's edition:
There are also extensive audio recordings, which are available free of charge in MP3 format. These recordings are presently available only to teachers using the text for their classes.
About the Author
I teach French language and literature at California State University, Los Angeles. If you think you might be interested in using Liberté in your classroom, I would love to hear from you. My e-mail address is gangelo2 at calstatela dot edu.