Try explaining why using “had had” or “that that” can be grammatically correct. For examples: “The woman had had a bad day,” and “I can see that that bothers you.” Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

This week I tried to explain this to my English as a Foreign Language student, and instead simply gave more examples without explaining why they were good grammar. In fact, I recommended that she write sentences that would not create doubled words. Instead she might write, ‘The woman’s day had been difficult,” and “I can see that you are troubled by English grammar.”

I probably should be able to explain doubled words and a lot of other linguistic quirks, but when I weigh the value of our short time together I usually decide that it isn’t worth the effort—either mine or hers.  There are more important, and simpler, things that she needs to grasp first.

Another problem I am running into is that the workbook we have been provided includes a lot of readings that use outdated language.  Many of them are from classic texts but by virtue of being from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, a lot of the vocabulary is, well, weird.  At the very least, many of the words are rarely used, and some have changed their meanings over the years.

Words like Antipodes, thwart, whilst, romance (to mean fantastic story), and rectory are all words that were commonplace once, in England, but are rarely if ever heard in conversational American English today. When my time as a tutor ends, I am going to suggest that the people who provide this service look for a different book. My guess is that the readings selected were free from copyright because they were older by seventy years or more than the lifespan of their authors. What they gained in copyright costs, though, the workbook publishers have lost in clarity and familiarity.

I’m also struggling with the contexts and cultural components of some of the stories. This week’s readings included The Open Window by H.H. Munro (Saki) and a selection from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. In the first, a teenaged girl deceives an adult visitor about family members being killed while hunting, and she scares him with what is, essentially, a ghost story. For more advanced English students, this tale would provide lots of material for discussing symbolism and irony, etc. As a tutor in EFL, however, I got bogged down explaining why a child would disrespect an adult male by lying to him and why that is supposed to be amusing.

The selection about Alice falling down the rabbit hole was understood to be fantasy, but there were so many unfamiliar details that we got sidetracked. When you have never heard of things like marmalade or waistcoats, you are distracted from the joy of the story. It was also a bit tricky to explain why Alice used the word antipathies when she meant Antipodes. My student was unfamiliar with both words, and so the joke was lost.

In spite of the fact that my student had had a difficult time reading some of the material, she did a very good job of completing the exercises that followed.  I assured her that that was what mattered most.