Best textbook to go through with a teacher?

[reardoc007]

I'm looking for a textbook with a structured lesson plan that I can go through with my Mandarin teacher. She's spending quite alot of time creating personalised lessons for me and it must take up a good portion of her free time which of course makes me feel guilty as she has kids etc, and I really don't pay her enough money for that anyway. So I'm looking for a book that we can go through together that has pinyin and english translations, with a strong emphasis on speaking and grammar as opposed to reading as I'm not interested in learning characters at the moment.

I've had a quick read of the forum and NCPR and Integranted Chinese appears to be highly recommended, but I'm not sure whether these are primarily used for learning to read chinese.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[renzhe]

They cover anything.

If you're not interested in reading, you can simply focus on pinyin. She will have to transcribe the lessons into pinyin starting with the second book, but it's considerably less work than coming up with lessons from scratch.

I should warn you at this point, though, that I've never met anyone who got far without learning to read, unless they were immersed for a good amount of time. Even with immersion, it's rare, IMHO.

[Meng Lelan]

NPCR is probably better. Integrated Chinese, a lot of teachers are forced to use it because it is very tightly organized for vocabulary and grammar but both teachers and students don't like it because it covers less cultural material and there's a lot of drill, drill, drill.