The hardworking and highly motivated student is one of three recipients of the Premier’s VCE Awards 2020 for Italian, along with Lara Partridge of Genazzano FCJ College and Carmel Italiano of Our Lady of Mercy College.
“When we were younger I was considered the least successful in Italian, compared with my brother and sister, despite being the eldest,” she laughed.
“I was a little bit offended by this and I decided to improve my Italian, particularly my speaking skills.
“At one point, before I went to bed every night, I’d ask my parents to choose a verb which I then I had to conjugate in the passato remoto (simple past) tense.”
After attending school for a term near the northern Italian city of Monza, where her grandparents live, Coladonato chose to study Italian by distance education with the Victorian School of Languages (VSL), as her mainstream school, Williamstown High, does not offer her parents’ mother tongue as a subject.
“I knew that I wanted to improve my Italian, especially my writing skills,” she said.
“It’s all well and good to have the skills to talk with friends and family, but grammar is also important.
“With VSL, we receive writing and reading comprehension activities every week and we have a conversation with the teacher every fortnight.”
Coladonato discovered a few years after her time studying in Italy that her parents’ decision to give their three children an immersion experience was driven by the fear that they would lose their command of their heritage language.
“Now they know that we’ll never forget Italian and they no longer insist on us speaking it at home, especially at the table,” she said.
The Premier’s VCE Awards are not the first recognition that Coladonato has received thanks to her commitment to her studies; in 2019, she won an award in a competition for schools organised by Deakin University for her research on the laws of physics in music.
She is currently focusing on her other four VCE subjects (English, French, biology and mathematics) and hopes to study environmental sciences in the future, possibly in Boston, where she spent four years of her life before moving to Melbourne.
“It’s a city to which I’m very emotionally attached and which offers many courses in the field of environmental sciences, but the pandemic makes everything more difficult,” she concluded.
