This work aims to investigate the literacy difficulties presented by high school students of a state school located in a low income neighborhood of the Northern Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The author of this dissertation is an English language teacher in this context and became interested in the subject when she realized that the challenges faced by her students echoed news published in newspapers, electronic, radio and television portals about the weak performance of Brazilian students in such national and international examinations as SAEB, ENEM and Pisa. Seeking to understand and contribute to such a serious social situation, this qualitative-interpretative research is considered an Applied Linguistics study and was carried out with several 1st year high school English classes, in which the researcher was also the teacher. The theoretical framework was anchored not only in the concepts of literacy, both in the mother tongue and in the foreign language, as presented by Street (1984), Soares (1998) and Rojo (2009) but also in the ideas of Exploratory Practice (Allwright; Hanks, 2009). Thus, the teacher-researcher systematized her daily observations regarding the literacy work that she had been doing since 2010, from the perspective of textual genres as forms of life and social actions (Miller, 1984; Bazerman, 2006), with entering high school students. The reflective understandings achieved confirm the need for intensifying mother tongue and foreign language teaching and learning through a genre pedagogy and also suggest the importance of encouraging further studies on school literacy practices.