Harding obtained his
Bachelor of Arts degree in
Linguistics at the
University of Melbourne in 2002. Later he got his
Master of Arts degree in Applied Linguistics and a PhD degree in
Applied Linguistics at the
University of Melbourne in 2008. Since 2011 Harding has been a professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of
Lancaster University, United Kingdom since 2010. On 19 April 2017, Harding along with
Charles Alderson and Tineke Brunfaut were selected as the winner of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) Best Article Award. The award-winning paper, Towards a Theory of Diagnosis in Second and Foreign Language Assessment: Insights from Professional Practice Across Diverse Fields, was published in 2015 in the journal
Applied Linguistics. The study investigated how diagnosis is theorized and carried out across a diverse range of professions with a view to finding commonalities that can be applied to the context of second and foreign language assessment. On the basis of interviews with professionals from fields such as car mechanics, IT systems support, medicine, psychology and education, a set of principles was drawn up to facilitate inform a comprehensive theory of diagnostic assessment in a second or foreign language. On 9 October 2018, Harding was an invited speaker at
Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C. He delivered a speech entitled "English as a Lingua Franca and Language Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities". As of 2019, he is a co-editor of the journal
Language Testing. ==Research==