English Language Teaching (ELT) has always been a challenge in India. English has been taught in various ways depending on the availability of infrastructure and expertise. Teaching the language through group activities, however, is an effective alternative, especially when it is being taught with the purpose of developing communicative abilities. However, the kind of English to be taught has remained a point of contention. While some stress on the importance of teaching `Standard' English, others talk about the necessity of teaching Indian English, the way it has evolved. Given the inherent Indian culture trait to learn, adapt and operate in various kinds of languages, it will be profitable for our students to look at English as one of the Indian languages. A case is made for tapping the efficacy of task-based learning with emphasis on role-plays and problem solving. While insights from DeBono's "Lateral Thinking" inform the paper on the subject, task-based activities, creatively drawn from a popular O' Henry short story, illustrate the ideas presented in the paper. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is not to discuss teaching Standard English, but to facilitate students to communicate in reasonably good and intelligible English by equipping them with the competence to take advantage of the growing market opportunities.

Traditionlly, India is a country where almost every person is atleast a bilingual. Among us, there are many who are multilingual too. Although in most cases this means speaking more than one language with near native fluency, in many of us it also includes the skill to read and write in more than one language. This comes naturally to us because of the multicultural setting we have always had. We function almost naturally in multicultural, multilingual situations and go about our day-to-day activities in more than one language or at least in different dialects. This has been our racial advantage for a long time. Given such a situation, it is surprising that problems relating to English language teaching have occupied so much of our academic and cultural space. This may be because the larger society does not really function through English as it does through the reginal lanuages. English is spoken by only around 7% of our population and that too in limited contexts—academic, official and at times, social.

Another added dimension to this feature is that we hardly have one English to learn. There is of course the Standard English that comes to us in textbooks, radio broadcasts, etc., but the English spoken is often as varied as we are. We invariably speak our Oriya, Telugu or Punjabi English.

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