I am taking a Linguistics course and I am helping a ESL student correct her essay. In her sample essay she wrote "....It has been very hard for...

In order to explain a problematic construction to a student, it is better to try to focus on what the student is trying to express rather than correcting the construction to meet what the tutor believes the student is trying to express. In this way, the tutor gains information that allows the tutor to provide the student with an understanding of how to express a particular idea rather than merely fixing it for them. This is why you would want to focus on using metalinguistic terminology rather than just “correcting” the construction.

With regard to the particular construction, "It has been very hard for me getting adapted with the busy lifestyle," the issue is not that the use of continuous (or perhaps progressive) aspect is necessarily incorrect, but rather that the student is using a non-standard form to express this aspect. To better understand this, we need to break down the sentence.

In the sentence, “getting adapted” is not the verb, so the issue of continuous tense is not relevant. What is relevant is that the form is expressing what appears to be a progressive aspect. We can see this if we rewrite the sentence with the nominalization as the subject of the sentence (and correcting ‘with’ to ‘to’, which is a collocation error):

Getting adapted to the busy lifestyle has been very hard.

This nominalization is still non-standard, but it is easier to see the student seems to be trying to express a progressive aspect. The issue then is the non-standard use of ‘to get’. If we eliminate ‘to get’ and change ‘adapted’ from the participle to the gerund, ‘adapting’, we have:

Adapting to the busy lifestyle has been very hard.

This modification results in a better formed sentence, but perhaps loses some of the speaker’s intended meaning. Specifically, the loss of ‘getting’, even though it is non-standard usage, seems to change the sentence from a progressive to a continuous aspect (i.e. from something that was a process but perhaps is complete to something that is continuously ongoing). So, consider the following revision:

Becoming adapted to the busy lifestyle has been very hard.

Here, we see a progressive aspect expressed. This construction indicates that the process of adapting is perhaps complete now rather than continuously ongoing, which seems to encompass the aspect desired by the student in using the non-standard form ‘getting adapted.'

Finally, let’s change the sentence so that ‘it’ is again the subject, as in the original:

It has been very hard becoming adapted to the busy lifestyle.

Here, we can see the major problem in the original construction was not the type of nominalization, but rather the word choice of the nominalization. In this sense, we can see it as a collocation error, although I think it is not so much an error based on the expected combination of words as it is the student using ‘to get’ in its colloquial ‘to become’ or ‘to grow’ meaning (e.g. ‘getting stronger,’ ‘getting bigger,’  and ‘getting smarter’).