A Critical Review of Français Général pour les étudiants des universités

General French (1991-1994) is one of the important textbooks in the teaching / learning of FFL in Iran.  This work aims to evaluate the objectives of book and the properties of its texts according to their degree of specialization and the methodology of the work in relation to the teaching of understanding of the writings. First, we have shown that the objectives of the committee in question are slammed on those of the structure-global-audio-visual methods and that the General French content does not correspond to these. Secondly, using the Coupe’s (1986) analysis model, we have shown that all the texts contained in the book, except one of them, are popular, informative and limited to a small number of communication situation. In this part, we have noted that the process of presenting from easy to difficult and from popularized to specific, proposed by the committee, is not followed in the book. And finally, in a third step, relying on the Global Approach of Moirand (1979), we noted that the method of the book to teach reading understanding is bottom-up. In general, the failure to take into account various communication situations, such as various conceptual domains and psycho-cognitive learning, means that General French is already outdated at its first publication in bookshops.