This work examines the impact that the life histories of people can have on their vocabulary. The book shows how discursive relations outside education position people through their vocabularies. Some are prepared for easy entry into life-long prospects of privilege and educational success, while others are denied entry. It argues that education fails to take account of the fact that many children's discursive relations, before and outside schools, are inconsistent with the kinds of lexicosemantic demands that present-day schools and their high-status culture of literacy place upon them: often unnecessarily. Partly as a result of this, many students - both native speakers and those whose second language is English - are almost guaranteed to fail in the middle levels of contemporary education before they have a chance to show that they can succeed. The book draws on theory and research from discursive psychology and the sociology of language, but this interdisciplinary study also integrates a wide range of international work from linguistics, psycholinguistics, foreign language studies, history, philosophy, anthropology, classics, first-language education and ESL/EFL education.