My article and Graft's response form an interesting set of working boundaries on where studies on literacy should set up camp and what then they might set out to explore. The locus of my concern was a high school English program as a grand defender of literacy; I had inquired into what the students were taking from this important, though by no means sole, source of meaning. A single academic subject sets a narrow range and, as well, plays a surprisingly small part--certainly from a teacher's point of view---in what concerns students. Yet, for all of that, schools are held responsible for the state of literacy in this society. The boundary line between what English programs demand from literacy and what students take is the territory I began to cover in this project. The scope is limited; the argument is bound. But if these limitations are justified, or at least well-intentioned, then Graft is rightly curious about the exact nature of the school's part in the development of this literacy and about my ability to bring it into focus. The question is a methodological one. In pinning down the school's contribution to the students' approach to literacy, we have but what the students say and do. The difficulty is specifying---unearthing and documentingmnot what is taught but what is taken, that is, the exact nature of the school's contribution. It may seem safe to assume, for example, that the school had taught Edward and Chris how to read and write, yet such skills are acquired on occasion without the help of the school, or even, some have suggested, in spite of it (Smith, 1971). The interviews and sentence completion tests which I conducted were intended to probe the students' private and individual understandings of literacy. I hoped this might lead back to the lessons I had witnessed in class. But, as the nature of literacy remains clouded in students' minds (though less so in the two instances I presented), tracing the bounds of the school's hegemony and power moves ahead slowly, tentatively. One is always looking for that cross-checking substantiation, if only in similar attitudes between otherwise dissimilar students. Still, after that defence of the binding and limited nature of my argument, I would not deny the soundness of Graft's advice to examine more thoroughly not only the context outside of the English program but also the impact of literacy outside of the school and, in the life to come, after graduation. In analyzing the data, it had become clear to me that the students were taking a good deal of their understanding about the nature of language from lessons out of class on the issue of language differences--both in social class and gender terms. (Teachers were letting these lessons slip by as outside their domain.) With a more definite sense of the family's and community's contribution to