She is currently Provost Professor and ESL Coordinator at Indiana University (Bloomington).
[1] She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1976 and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1978 at the California State University, Northridge.
She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1983, with a dissertation entitled, A Functional Approach to English Sentence Stress.
[2] Her primary research interests are second-language temporality and tense-mood-aspect systems and interlanguage pragmatics.
[3][4] Bardovi-Harlig is credited for the creation of the Coordination Index (CI) which was published in the TESOL Quarterly in 1992 and since then has been considered as the only reliable measure of coordination.