This research focusses on narrative texts produced by elementary students from a public school in Rio de Janeiro, as part of an activity oftext production in which a source text was given to students, read and discussed, as a way of motivating their writing practice. The purpose of this work is to investigate the context of production of texts written in the classroom; the nature ofthe relationship between the text written by students and the source text given to motivate the production of the narrative text; and, finally, to show what sort of identities are constructed in these texts. The methodology of this research is qualitative and interpretative, based on ethnographic data, and the corpus is made up of texts produced in Portuguese Language classes, attended by 9th graders. The classroom is seen as an important context for the discussion of paraphrastic relations established between the source text and the text produced by students, but it is also seen as a special site for the construction of identities and social discourses. The theoretical framework, within the domain of Applied Linguistics, combines narrative theory (for the investigation of processes of construction of identity) and textual linguistics, for the investigation of paraphrastic relations in the students texts, particularly intertextual relations. From the point of view of paraphrastic relations, analysis of the corpus suggests that students incorporate, in their own texts, features of the source text. However, analysis also indicates that, in relation to social contexts and identities, students create their own stories, introducing ideas about the family, religion, apart from telling personal stories of resilience in the face of material difficulties and disease. The main contribution of this research is to suggest that work in the classroom with text driven activities is not an obstacle to a student s creativity in the process of production of a text; nor is it an obstacle to the creation of a particular discursive and social identity for the student.