The majority of Brazilian public schools adopt a system which keeps students who fail at the end of the school year in the same grade. As an English language teacher in the school where this study was guided, I have been teaching a group of students who have remained in the sixth grade for three, four, or even five years. Based on this fact, my motivation to conduct this research derived from an interest in investigating: (1) how do students evaluate the context in which they find themselves? (2) which identities are constructed during the interaction among students/participants and teacher/researcher? The study is based on the sociosemiotic approach of language, as proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, aligned with socioconstructionist paradigms of identity which conceive it as a fluid, emerging, interactional and sociocultural phenomena. The construction of identities is observed in small stories spontaneously told during Discussion Groups carried out with the participants. Two perspectives lead the analysis of evaluative moments in the narratives: the analytical tools of the Appraisal Theory and the seminal and contemporary theoretical concepts related to narratives, which emphasize the study of evaluation in narrative discourse. Following a qualitative methodology, ten students from secondary school and EJA ( Educação de Jovens e Adultos ) were interviewed by the researcher/teacher about how they see their school practice. Stories told by the participants portray situations of everyday school life which suggest relationships of conflict among students, teachers, coordinators and principals. The coconstruction of small stories indicates strong attitudes of collective identities through which participants blame the other, constructing themselves as victims of a school environment that does not provide the necessary quality of life for an effective learning process.