
Learn English with this vampires English lesson
Date: Aug 16 2013
Grammar: Present Perfect Tense
Intro
1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.
2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.
What can you remember about your first scary movie? Was it about zombies, perhaps? Maybe it was about Frankenstein, the famous monster made in a lab. It’s possible you saw one about vampires who sleep in coffins, hate sunlight, and, of course, drink blood. What a way to live!
Vampires only come out at night when people are the most vulnerable. After a vampire bites his victim, the victim becomes a vampire, too! Yet many books, movies, and TV shows today want us to feel sympathetic to vampires. Are we supposed to believe they’re just misunderstood?
Mason and Greta share their opinions of vampires in this English lesson about the things that scare us.
Dialog
1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.
2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.
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Mason: I wonder what you think the next horror-fright movie-villain that’s going to become a thing is going to be. Because I’m getting pretty tired of vampires.
Greta: Yeah, I know what you mean. The whole Twilight thing has kind of soured me on them. Although I have a deep and abiding love of vampires. But this new vampire popularity, it’s hardly the stuff of nightmares. It’s pretty silly.
Mason: Don’t you feel like they’ve kind of watered it down? There’s so much of it out there, and there have been so many different spins on the vampire stuff that the mystique around it, and the history, and a lot of the stuff that made it cool…
Greta: But, you know, no vampires in pop culture today sleep in coffins. And most of them have fangs, but they don’t have those big fangs that hang down, they just kind of pop out when they’re ready to drink blood.
Mason: Uh, isn’t that how they always were?
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Discussion
Mason is pretty tired of vampires. He asks Greta what kind of villain she thinks they’re going to start seeing in books and movies because he thinks that vampires are on the way out. At least, he hopes they are, because Mason’s ready to leave vampires in the past to make way for something new.
Greta loves the way that vampires used to sleep in coffins and have big, terrifying fangs for biting their victims. She feels that the vampires we read about or see on TV today aren’t scary at all, and that’s kind of messed it up for her. Clearly, Greta wants the old vampires back. The new ones can’t even give her nightmares!
Vampires have definitely changed throughout history. What do you think of today’s vampires? Are they just as scary as the ones you read about as a kid? If not, what would make them more scary?
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