@OK, it isn’t the matter of the vocabularies , it’s a matter of how they are put together. You can understand every word in the page of a book and still not have the slightest clue on what the author is talking about. For me, an English literature class is an exercise of getting into the mind of some authors and try to figure out what they are thinking. I am not the kind of person who read minds and didn’t do well literature. However, analyzing a text explicitly, instead of what the author is NOT saying, appeals to me. I did better in college than high school because college offered something that I could comprehend. The op’s student may not have a mind that performs the way that the curriculum requires him to. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as the student puts forth the effort to learn what he can