The Project
There is growing evidence that high-quality teacher-child interactions are central to children’s early learning, and supporting these may be an effective and sustainable way of improving children’s outcomes in low-income or resource-constrained contexts. The LangQuest-PK project aims to adapt and validate LangQuest, a teacher self-audit tool, originally developed within the department, to support language- and communication-rich classroom practice in the early years. The project is being implemented in collaboration with the Teachers Resource Centre (TRC), a leading teacher-training institute in Karachi.
The project focuses on ensuring that LangQuest is culturally meaningful, practically usable, and psychometrically robust for early childhood classrooms in Pakistan. The adaptation process includes structured item review and consensus-building workshops with teacher trainers, translation and back-translation of the tool, cognitive interviewing with teachers, and expert review. The adapted tool will then be piloted in classrooms and compared with independent observations of teaching practice to examine how well teachers’ self-assessments align with observed classroom interactions.
We hope that the LangQuest-PK can be used by educators to identify strengths in their practice, set goals for improvement, and receive structured guidance on creating language-rich classroom environments (Mazhar & Sylva, 2025). By positioning structured self-audit as a low-cost and sustainable approach to improving classroom quality, the project contributes to ongoing efforts to enhance early language development and learning opportunities for young children in resource-constrained contexts.
The project is funded through the Sylva-Chan Fellowship and the Departmental Small Research Grants.
