John Barkley Means (born 1938) was an American professor of Liberal Arts at Temple University from 1968 to 2003.
Scholarly publications during his first decade at Temple University focused on Ibero-American culture, including Essays on Brazilian Literature (Simon & Schuster Inc, 1971).
In the 1980s and '90s, Means's academic interests also incorporated United States Department of Education grant-funded adult language-acquisition research.
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.
Also during this period, Means served as a language/linguistics curriculum evaluator for the American Council on Education, and was consulting editor for foreign language textual materials with Norton Publishers, New York, NY.