Eight students in various Chinese classes received awards in an essay contest run by the Chinese Language Association of Secondary-Elementary Schools.

Students were required to write about a person who has influenced them.

The contest was split into three categories of submission: the regular category, heritage category and immersion program, and all of those who applied from the school won a prize in their designated category. The essays were scored for their strength in numerous categories, including comprehensibility, ideas and content and presentation and characters.

The essays were scored for their strength in numerous categories, including comprehensibility, ideas and content and presentation and characters.

The essays were scored for their strength in numerous categories including comprehensibility, ideas and content and presentation and characters.

Diego Ayala ’18 won a Gold Apple in the regular advanced category, Sarah Moon ’19 and Tierni Kaufman ’19 won a Silver Apple in the regular advanced category and Strauss Cooperstein ’18 and Asher Vogel ’19 won Honorable Mentions in the regular advanced category. Sarah Wilen ’19, Francis de Beixedon ’19, Charlie Meenaghan ’19 won Honorable Mentions in the heritage advanced category.

The Chinese program offered this opportunity for the first time this year to encourage students and help them demonstrate their proficiency after years of learning the language, according to Chinese teacher Kun Li.

“I am proud of my students’ performance in this competition,” Li wrote in an email. “I started this because I want my students to have a sense of achievement after learning Chinese for three years at Harvard-Westlake. It is a good opportunity to demonstrate their proficiency level on a bigger stage outside school.”

The essay not only helped with Chinese essay-writing skills, but also allowed students to reflect on their lives, Kaufman said.

“It was nice to prove to myself that I can write pretty fluently in Chinese, and it helped me to learn how to use all the different sentence structures in a cohesive essay,” Kaufman said. “I wrote about my dad and how he’s influenced me, but I wrote in Chinese, which is my mom’s background, so it was interesting to combine both of my heritages together.”