[citation needed] Since 2011 Harding has been a professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom since 2010.
[citation needed] 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.