Or: why more words is the wrong prescription
There’s a specific kind of stuck that C1 students hit, and it’s not really a vocabulary problem, even though it presents as one. They know the word. They can define it, translate it, use it correctly in a gap-fill exercise. And then they open their mouth in a real conversation and reach for the same six safe adjectives they’ve been using since B2. Technically fluent, stylistically flat.
The instinct, mine included, for years, is to prescribe more words. It doesn’t work, because the bottleneck was never access to vocabulary. It’s what Edward de Bono, whose institute in Malta I did some of my later training at, would call vertical thinking doing all the work: following the one obvious, well-worn path from thought to sentence, the path that’s been reinforced by years of ‘correct’ answers in a classroom. Vertical thinking is efficient and safe. It is also, by definition, incapable of finding a route it hasn’t already used.
De Bono’s actual contribution wasn’t vocabulary or grammar, he had nothing to say about either. It was a set of deliberate provocations designed to interrupt the default path and force a different one. Two translate unexpectedly well into language teaching.
The first is random entry: deliberately introducing an unrelated word or concept and forcing a connection to the thing you’re actually discussing. In a lesson, that might mean handing a student an unrelated noun, umbrella, say, mid-discussion of a business problem, and asking them to use it as a metaphor for their point. It’s uncomfortable and a little absurd the first time. It also reliably produces language nobody would generate by translating directly from their L1, because there’s no direct route to translate from. The provocation forces genuinely new phrasing, not recycled phrasing dressed in new vocabulary.
I remember trying this on a student mid-negotiation roleplay, stuck defending a price increase in the same three hedging phrases she always reached for. I held up a mug from my desk and told her to work it into her argument somehow. There was a pause, visible confusion, and then: ‘Our price is like this mug, it doesn’t change shape just because you squeeze it harder.’ Not a sentence she’d ever produced before, and not one she could have translated from anywhere, because the mug hadn’t been part of the conversation thirty seconds earlier. That’s the mechanism working, not a coincidence.
The second is PO, de Bono’s own term for a deliberate, flagged provocation, a statement offered not as true but as a stepping stone to somewhere true. ‘PO, meetings should be silent.’ You then have to construct the reasoning that gets you there, in real time, in English. This does something specific for advanced learners: it separates the thinking from the translating. Most C1 plateau speech is thought-in-L1-then-translated. A live, invented provocation can’t be translated, because it didn’t exist a second ago in either language. The student has to think generatively in English, which is a different and much harder skill than recalling a memorised phrase, and it’s the one that actually produces range.
None of this replaces grammar or vocabulary work. It sits on top of it, for students who already have the raw material and are stuck rearranging the same six pieces. The plateau isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s a habit of finding the same obvious sentence every time. Lateral thinking tools don’t teach English. They just make the obvious sentence a less appealing place to stop.
Sources
De Bono, E. (1967). Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity. Ward Lock Educational, the book that introduced the term and the core concept.
De Bono, E. (1992). Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas. HarperCollins, source of the Random Entry and Provocation (PO) techniques described here.