John Barkley Means

Who was John Barkley Means?

John Barkley Means, Ph.D. was an American professor of Liberal Arts at Temple University from 1968 to 2003. He served as founding director of the Center for Critical Languages. He joined the foreign language faculty at that university on completion of doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Initially focusing on the development of Luso-Brazilian programs at Illinois and Temple, in the 1970s Means's professional interests broadened to include the development of non-traditional academic methodologies for the teaching of low-enrollment languages at the college/university level and, subsequently, at the secondary level as well. Scholarly publications during his first decade at Temple University focused on Ibero-American culture, including Essays on Brazilian Literature. In the 1980s and '90s, Prof. Means's academic interests also incorporated grant-funded adult language-acquisition research.

To this end, Prof. Means established Temple University's Critical Languages Center in 1975 and, in 1977, assumed directorship of the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs, a newly developing consortium of schools providing courses in various less commonly taught languages through an auto-didactic approach to individualized instruction. Under Means's leadership, the association expanded during the 1980s from a largely regional into a fully national association of over 125 institutions with self-accessed academic programs in more than forty foreign languages—i.e., most modern languages offered in North American secondary and higher educational institutions except Spanish, French, and German. During this period, the association received external funding from the U.S. Department of Education and private foundations for support of academic initiatives administered by Prof. Means at Temple University. In 1998, after more than twenty years under Means's directorship, the NASILP secretariat was transferred to the University of Arizona, where it is currently administered by Prof. Alexander Dunkel.