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Luke William Harding (born 11 July 1977) is an Australian linguist. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on language assessment with a special focus on listening assessment, pronunciation assessment, and diagnostic language assessment. He is the current Editor-in-chief of the journal, Language Testing.
Career
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
In a journal article, published in 2012 in Language Testing, Harding investigated the potential for a shared-L1 advantage on an academic English listening test featuring speakers with L2 accents.
Publications
Harding has published in several major journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language Testing, Language Teaching, Assessing Writing, and Language Assessment Quarterly. He has also published journal articles with Charles Alderson.