This paper presents the NLP-TEA 2016 shared task for Chinese grammatical error diagnosis which seeks to identify grammatical error types and their range of occurrence within sentences written by learners of Chinese as foreign language. We describe the task definition, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. Of the 15 teams registered for this shared task, 9 teams developed the system and submitted a total of 36 runs. We expected this evaluation campaign could lead to the development of more advanced NLP techniques for educational applications, especially for Chinese error detection. All data sets with gold standards and scoring scripts are made publicly available to researchers.