The project stemmed from the professional debate in India on second language acquisition and a quest among those who held a "strongly-felt pedagogic intuition" (p. 1) that communicative competency represented a major key to effective learning. This view challenged the "Structural-Oral-Situational method," which may be viewed as roughly analogous to the Audio Lingual method popular in high schools and colleges since the 1960s based upon a scripted dialogue as the organizing center to practice listening comprehension, pronunciation, vocabulary, and various principles of grammar. These principles were reinforced through substitution-like drill work.

An underlying principle of both the SOS and Audio Lingual methodologies is that language learning can be taught through direct instruction. This perception serves as the basis for the voluminous ESL texts and workbooks based on structured dialogues and skill-based drills. A major difference between SOS and the theory of communicative competence is that in SOS the rules of grammar are absorbed through practice of artificially constructed language while the communicative competence view assumes that a focus on "meaning" (rather than form) is the most effective path to learning correct grammar.

While the communicative competence theory undergirded the project, its specific methodology was that of "task-based teaching." This emerged through trial and error during the project's early history and served as a contextual response to students' expectations for a scool-like given classroom reality of the project. Specifically students expected a school-like classroom environment focused on "real" learning with the teacher playing an important leadership role in the process.

Task-based teaching followed the Vygotskian scaffolding model where "the demand on thinking made by the activity was just above the level which learners could meet without help" (pp. 23-24). Specifically, students responded most favorably to "[r]easoning-gap activity, which involves deriving some new information from given information through processes of inference, deduction, practical reasoning, or a perception of relationships or patterns" (p. 46). Prabhu argues that, at least in the context of this school-based project, the most effective teaching took place through activities that pushed the cognitive boundaries of the students.