Analysis of Grammatical Errors in Written Texts by Latvian Students of Chinese as a Foreign Language

The main goal of this paper is to find out the most wide-spread syntactical errors, their causes and to put forward new, useful teaching strategies. From the perspective of the Error Analysis (EA), the research objects of this article are errors in the learning process of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) by Latvian students. Main tasks were: to collect examples of four types of errors (i.e. wrong word order, wrong usage of words, wrong addition of words and wrong omission of words), to analyze reasons for these errors; to gather opinions via questionnaires in order to understand the motivation of students and to learn their, strengths and weakness while learning the Chinese language. The result of the research shows that errors of wrong sentence structure and wrong usage of words are the most wide-spread. There are six types of common errors among collected data. A direct transfer of the mother tongue and a generalization of knowledge in teaching and learning are the major causes for such errors. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the prediction of errors, the correction of errors and the selfcorrection.