Because they are used most by more people. In Taiwan, as I know, more and more friends and colleagues decided to use “Everyday Chinese” as their textbook. I also found “Integrated Chinese” is very popular in the U.S.A. I think in the future there will be more chances for me to use these two books.
If you ask my favorite textbook, I would choose “Practical Audio-Visual Chinese”1 & 2. Because I like to understand grammar before I try to remember the material. This interest also reflects on my teaching. “Practical Audio-Visual Chinese” was edited in a very grammatical order. I always told my students: when you can handle all the grammar in these two books, you can handle all basic grammar in Mandarin Chinese. What you have to do next, is remember more vocabularies, and more sentence patterns which are constructed by the basic grammar.
Nevertheless, some students indeed don’t like to remember the grammar syntax . For this type of student, it is more important to create a similar situation in the classroom. The student will get involved , and remember one sentence by one sentence, and apply that in their life. For this type of student, I will recommend “Everyday Chinese”.
Moreover,although “Practical Audio-Visual Chinese” has very clear grammatical order, but there are not many explanations for students. It would be very difficult to learn from this material by students themselves. On the contrary, “Everyday Chinese” and “Integrated Chinese” has very detailed explanations in English. It easier to understand for a student who is trying to learn Chinese without a teacher.
