The Future of Education

Chinese is offered as a foreign language in the most international schools in Malaysia and students in Chinese classes come from various dominant language backgrounds. Many previous studies on error analysis mainly focused on the Chinese character writing, vocabulary and word order and on groups like Chinese-speaking children or Malaysian students in Chinese universities [1, 2, 3]. Currently, there is still a lack of research done on analyzing composition writing errors among Chinese learners in the international schools in Malaysia. This study aims to investigate the writing errors (including Chinese character-, word- and grammar-level errors) of 40 Malaysian high-school learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The participants’ dominant languages vary, such as English, Tamil, Malay and Korean and they all learned Chinese for approximately three to four years. Based on the school proficiency tests, they can be regarded as intermediate users of Chinese. These high schoolers will be asked to write a composition on the topic of My School or My Family in about 80 to 100 characters. During the writing process, students are not allowed to refer to Chinese books or dictionaries. They will be given 45 minutes to complete the composition. After the writing, the researchers will collect their composition and analyze character-, word- and grammar-level errors. Descriptive analysis and error analysis will be used in the study. The findings will indicate participants’ writing errors on a character, word and grammar level and whether participants from various language backgrounds perform differently on the errors. Besides, the findings of the study will be discussed with pedagogical implications and future research suggestions.