Shaler Area High School students took home the top prize and four additional awards in the 2015 High School Japanese Speech Contest on March 6 at the University of Pittsburgh.

Shaler Area students competed against students from eight other area high schools’ Japanese programs to demonstrate their speaking ability in the language.

Senior Kevin Kachur won the Grand Prize and 1st place overall. Senior Luke Pomrenke came in 2nd place overall. In the Intermediate category, Evan Lysko, a sophomore, placed 2nd, and sophomores Jake Matthews and Stephen Borgen tied for 3rd place.

Students were to give a 3 to 5 minute speech addressing the question “What would I do to save resources?” Students were judged based on communicating meaning, fluency, cultural appropriateness, vocabulary use, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, presentation, effectiveness of presentation and that the speech level is appropriate for the grade level/years studied.

“I cannot stress how difficult of a topic this was to do in Japanese, and I'm really impressed with how all of our Shaler Area students performed,” said Steven Balsomico, High School Japanese teacher.