About my TFG (End Of Grade project)

As any other student of 4th year of any degree, the idea of ​​the TFG worries and scares me. Choosing a topic interesting enough to investigate about and which has not been too much written before, is not an easy thing to do. Even when the topic is chosen, as we have never faced the realization of a work of this nature, we cannot avoid having a feeling of insecurity and uncertainty, not knowing whether what we are doing is right or not.

Personally, when I started the internship period I had no idea what my TFG was going to be about. I had thought to do it about games as a motivational resource to learn a foreign language, since I work in a language school teaching English to children of all ages, and I have seen their implication and their facility to learn vocabulary and grammatical structures while playing entertaining games adapted to their level. However, I didn’t know how could I carry out my research about this topic in school.

One day, Juande (the head teacher and the Physical Education teacher) told me that he was going to perform a CLIL Didactic Unit in the first course of Primary School as a trial, because the school wants to teach the subject of PE using this method next year. He told me that it would be a good idea to make my TFG about this subject, so I suggested the title " Teaching Physical Education through English as a foreign language: CLIL" to Luís (my TFG tutor at the University) and he gave me the nod.

Setting the title and the topic of my TFG gave me much more security, because it is a subject that has not been almost studied before, and on which I will be able to make an observation and an analysis of results as the school itself is going to put it into practice.

So, the purpose of my TFG is to check whether the adoption of English as the language to teach the subject of Physical Education, promotes the communicative competence in this language as the problems of comprehension and expression in English that the most of Spanish students have at the end of their compulsory education period denote the ineffectiveness of the methods used to teach this language in our country until this moment. Therefore, it is essential to investigate about other alternative methods as the proposed (CLIL) which allows a greater contextualization of the contents.

The methodology by which I intend to carry out the development of my TFG, is the research on CLIL and its implementation in the first year of Primary Education of the School Sant Roc from Silla, in order to see firsthand the results and to intervene and adapt our actions to the progress and to make practical proposals that can be relevant to other teachers.

So, the observation and the teacher notebook will be the main resources that will allow us to record and evaluate both, the progress of students and the results.