The study explores how young men who have recently completed a senior secondary school English course account for their success and/or failure in the subject, and analyses what common-sense understandings and social discourses underpin students’ tacit and explicit definitions of this school success and failure. Discussions with the participants involved multifarious topics such as teacher pedagogy, family role models, gender, and activities outside of school that influenced their experiences and notions of success in school. The study seeks to identify whether or not young mens’ accounts of their own success or failure in English at secondary level align with existing theorisations and explanations on the subject of male learning and academic achievement in English studies. The theoretical perspectives of post-structuralism and critical language awareness inform the study, which utilises narrative methods to generate data and critical discourse analysis to provide a theorisation of the social and textual world. The study utilises aspects of post-structuralist theory to examine the concepts of gender, maleness and hegemonic masculinity in education (Connell, 1987; Martino, 1995) and acknowledges that these terms are used in arguments that support both the notion that gender and maleness are socially constructed and that they are inherent. This research project is motivated by a critical social purpose to address the apparently intractable problem that many boys do not experience success and are underachieving in school subject English, with a view to motivating a change to the status quo and providing a platform for further research using CDA methodology.