Watching movies to learn English is always a custom for most English learners. However, English is learned not only from the plot of the movie, but mostly from the words, phrases and sentences in the movie.

Movie is a kind of media that synchronizes audio and video and requires people’s vision and hearing simultaneously. Using excellent original English movies which are with intuitive scene and vivid content to learn English is of great significance for Chinese students to study English under the great Chinese environment. English movies have played a positive role in creating authentic language environment, improving listening and speaking skills, stimulating interests in learning English, cultivating English thoughts, enhancing cultural awareness and improving cross-cultural communicative competence.

First of all, vocabulary learning from English movies:

The traditional vocabulary learning mode is visual learning, which is useful but not the most effective. While the audio-visual collaborative learning of English movies (with English subtitles) can be used as a new vocabulary learning mode. In the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth II , there is a line mentioning the title translation of the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea written by Jules Verne, the “league” here is no longer the usual meaning of “联盟、社团”, but “里格”, a length unit.

In Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance , a knight said to the robbers: “looking to my eyes，your soul is stained by the blood of the innocent. Feel their pain!” ( 看着我的眼睛，你的灵魂被受害者侵蚀了，感受他们的痛苦吧!) Here “stain” means “弄脏，污染，污点”, and “Innocent” means “无辜的，清白的”. Through these words, we can easily grasp the two advanced vocabulary.

Secondly, grammar learning from English movies

Many people feel headache learning English grammar, because the grammar is too boring. They lose interest in grammar and gradually lose interest in learning English. Therefore they could not stick to learning and finally give up. When I was watching some classic English movies, I noticed that some lines contain basic grammatical structure, which can be used in English grammar teaching by utilizing multimedia technologies. In Journey to the Center of the Earth II, there is a line, “If it weren’t for me, you’d be in juvie for the next six months.

” Here it is subjunctive mood guided by “if”. The clause is the assumption of the current situation, and the main clause uses the format of “would be” to express subjunctive mood. Likewise, from the grammatical interpretation point of view, in “Looking to my eyes，your soul is stained by the blood of the innocent.

Feel their pain!”, here the present participle “looking to my eyes” which should be “when you are looking to my eyes” (theoretically) is used as an adverbial; the conjunction “when”, subject “you” and verb “are” are omitted as the logical subject of the whole sentence is the same “you”. So it is a present participle functioning an adverbial in the whole sentence.

(to be continued)