As Barrie and Elf said, your intuition is correct. The basis of the error is a subtle one, as with most matters affecting simple past versus present perfect in English, but maybe you can it explain it to the student along the following lines (which you’ll need to adapt to whatever you’ve told them about this tense).
- The context doesn’t justify an experiential use of the present perfect. These uses make good answers to Have you ever questions (Have you ever swum with dolphins? seen a shark when surfing? eaten snake?). If I ask you, in a deposition, say, Have you ever been aware of the contents of an 43-101 report before reading it?, you could answer: Yes, I've been aware of the information the report contained even before reading it, meaning that at some vague point in the past you had awareness prior to reading. That is crucially different from what your student wants to say: that (s)he was aware at a specific time, just before a particular showing of a film.
- Nor is a resultant state perfect (present perfect of result) appropriate. When these combine with predicates that denote nonpunctual events (know the answer, believe the rumour, study French; as opposed to punctual burst the balloon, reach the summit), they usually mark the onset of the attained state (I’ve known the answer for five minutes / since you walked in the door), or indicate overlapping intervals (I’ve known the answer for the whole time you’ve been talking). They are infelicitous with phrases the mark other time points (e.g., the endpoint I’ve known the answer until you walked in, or a midpoint, Having figured it out five minutes ago, I’ve known the answer when you started explaining). The problem with the student’s sentence is that, in I have been aware before watching, the before clause highlights that awareness preceded watching, so an overlap reading is inappropriate and an onset reading is impossible.
The basic idea is, run through the list of uses you’ve given your students for present perfect and explain why none is apt here.
This is my opinion as an American. The past perfect is not gone, but it is my impression that we don't use the past perfect when the simple past is sufficient to relay the intended meaning. Most of the time, as in your sentences, there are other constructions to supplement the simple past and convey it as perfect past.
I heard about her before I met her.
The temporal marker "before" supplements "met", turning this simple past into the past perfect. But the following certainly wouldn't sound foreign to an American.
I had heard about her before I met her.
or, using the contraction...
I'd heard about her before I met her.
As for the following...
Yesterday, I heard about her for the first time.
This isn't past perfect. It's simple past, but an American might say the following.
I had heard about her when I met her yesterday.
Without the temporal marker "before", the past perfect is essential to convey the meaning. However, for that sentence to sound natural, I'd have to hear it as a response to a question, such as, "Didn't someone tell you about her?"
As for the following statement:
By the time he got to Phoenix, he had had enough to drink to make him stagger.
This is something that Word will fuss about and I'll ignore or modify to mollify. Word isn't the expert; it's a tool to help those who aren't. If you're an expert and Word is catching stuff, either it's wrong or you're too tired. An easy way to modify the above sentence and more closely resemble how I would actually speak it is to use a contraction.
By the time he got to Phoenix, he'd had enough to drink to make him stagger.
On the other hand, you can turn the verb around.
By the time he got to Phoenix, he had drunk enough to make him stagger.
The past perfect isn't gone in American English; we don't always use it when we don't have to.
Best Answer
British Proscription, America the Evil Twin
Comparing American and British English, the 2018 edition of the Oxford Companion to the English Language repeats verbatim the same observation from twenty years before:
Observation has become proscriptive grammar. Deprecating the past simple as non-standard for speakers of BrE with certain adverbs of indefinite time (already, just, yet…) has led to a false equivalency: since there is a British “rule” requiring one form, there must be a counterpart in AmE requiring the other. There is, however, no such rule.
To illustrate proper British usage, “American” examples are often simply invented by reversing the British rule, producing sentences no American would ever say, or at least not in the sense the example intends:
So, for instance, an archived BBC World Service webpage:
These two sentences ostensibly say the same thing in each variety, but they do not. AmE and BrE both have only one way to say:
Whether you ask someone in Hull or Houston “Did you ever go to Canada?, their response is going to be “When?” “Did you ever go to Canada while you lived in Vermont?” would make sense anywhere.
This flavor of the present perfect, where one asks living persons if they’ve ever been somewhere or done something and they reply they have or haven’t is called the experiential present perfect. It is never used for the dead or for time periods completely past — like the time someone lived in Vermont and did or did not go to Canada.
The Real Difference
The Oxford Companion is not conjuring up this difference out of thin air: there is a common usage with the present perfect and an American option for the past simple, but only in one particular usage.
The English present perfect combines tense — an action/state in the past — with aspect. The action/state of the verb may
Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has died at 61 in a suicide, CNN says.CNBC.
In all uses except the last, there is no difference between AmE and BrE. BrE strongly favors — or if the Oxford Companion or your website has anything to do with it — requires the resultative present perfect while AmE may see the action/state as completed, thus the past simple, even with adverbs of indefinite time, or use the resultative present perfect as BrE in the same way.
In the aggregate, of course, this will mean that AmE will use the resultative present perfect less than BrE, which should show up statistically in a well executed database search. What those numbers can’t tell you is that AmE uses the resultative perfect differently.
The Microsoft Americanism
British Windows users, for instance, have complained about about an OS prompt:
This has not escaped academic interest, as one linguist explains in a footnote:
The Windows prompt is asking a question about a completed action; British users expect one about a resultant state of having forgotten.
American Usage Explained
For many Americans, the choice of present perfect or past simple may depend on a perceived semantic difference between the two, the social situation in which the utterance occurs, or whether completed action or resultant state is topical. To return to the Oxford Companion’s question about food, here are two examples from American writers:
The first question inquires about a state, hunger or its lack, to judge the appropriateness of the invitation and the likelihood of dinner together. The second asks about a completed action, a part of a morning routine, which, like shaving, has been neglected because of sleeping late. This corresponds to both the semantic distinction between the two and the social situation where I would expect to hear or ask these questions myself.
But one could also hear:
Now I’d imagine that Doris knows that Grace prefers an early dinner and thus is asking about an action she assumes is likely to have been completed by the time her family sits down at the table. If by chance Grace didn’t follow her usual routine, Doris invites her to dinner, if only to avoid a socially awkward situation.
The difference ultimately rests with how the speaker views the past action: either as complete or producing the resulting state. BrE only allows the present perfect.
The Deepest Difference
The most remarkable difference in present perfect vs. past simple in BrE and AmE has, as far as I know, escaped the notice of grammarians, likely because the circumstances in which it occurs are not remotely conducive to thoughts about verb tenses. And that is when Americans suffer a serious injury, they will yell, scream or curse about it in the past simple, while a Briton will do so the present perfect. AmE: completed action, BrE: resultant state.
When the initial emergency is past and the resultant state becomes topical, an American may switch to the present perfect:
Conclusion
The American use of the past simple where British English uses the present perfect is limited but basic to the way each variety views recent events, including sliced fingers and broken limbs. Any notion that there is a general allergy to the present perfect in American English or that its speakers invariably use the past tense where it seems out of place to Britons is simply misinformed. Statistical analysis of even accurately assembled corpora — Google Books is, unfortunately, not one of them — cannot reveal the completed action-resultant state distinction even within AmE itself, much less in comparison to other varieties.
The resistance to Did you eat yet as an Americanism deprecated as sub-standard in BrE is puzzling until you think of the broken bones: that somehow the use of the past simple violates a deeper grammar than quibbling over adverbs.