The research investigates whether graduation is capable of deconstructing discourses based on common sense when Portuguese / English students talk about the importance of learning English in schools. To this end, the qualitative study is based on the concepts of the Social Theory of Discourse by Fairclough (2001); in the studies by Silva (2017) on the neoliberal aspects that impact the teaching of the English language and in the considerations of theorists who have the critical teaching of the language as an object of study, such as Pennycook (2009), Jordão (2004, 2014) and Oliveira (2014). As a methodology, we first investigated the presence of a common sense in the reasons for learning the language through historical bibliographic research, search for advertisements promoting the importance of the language and a questionnaire with forty volunteers of different age range and educational levels. After understanding what is the common sense about the need for learning English, the speeches - taken through semi-structured interviews - of eight graduates from a private college were analyzed. As a conclusion, it is possible to say that the speeches of senior students have less discursive elements considered as common sense. However, in general, the critical sense regarding language learning does not appear clearly in their speeches, which demonstrates that there is a lack of a more critical look at language teaching during graduation years.