Professional skills development for English major students using personal knowledge management

Abstract

English major students in China face the problem of meeting the requirements of the professional skills by the enterprises. Improving professional skills can help increase employment opportunities. This study employs the personal knowledge management as a framework for skills development. Its purpose is to place students at the center of their own learning to acquire, organize, share, and transform external knowledge into personal tacit knowledge. A sample of 20 junior students majoring in English at Chengdu University was selected purposively to conduct a self-learning for a three-month period. Document review and interview were used during the first stage of knowledge audit to find out the common skills' requirements. The following stage is knowledge capture and analysis to analyze the common skills gaps and identify students' self-evaluation on their skills using pre-test, scoring rubric and interview. The knowledge sharing stage attempts to develop the PKM model based on the concept of the Seek-Sense-Share framework. In the last stage of knowledge applying, the implementation and the measurement of the proposed model has been conducted using 'JINGYEQIAN' platform which is one of the most popular applications for virtual learning community. The result shows that professional knowledge and skills has been seen improved at some extent while personal knowledge management is useful in clarifying the learning goals, formulating learning activities and carrying out independent learning effectively. In the evaluation stage, the result also shows that students are less used to relying on the virtual learning community (the JINGYEQIAN), while they prefer to use WeChat to communicate the thoughts. Moreover, the students' satisfaction level on the PKM model also shows a high value by reviewing students' feedback that more than 80% of the students are satisfied with their learning results so that they will continue to use the PKM framework in their future learning.