Three said that their organisations had plans to incorporate computers into their teaching rooms in the short-term. Ready access to the Internet was not available in many cases, but was seen as something to be realistically achieved in the near future. One of the teachers without access to a computer on-site (a workplace programme) solved this problem by bringing her own laptop when she wanted to use one in her teaching. All of the teachers with access to a computer said that they used them, but their use varied according to the nature of the task being taught (and our observations had simply not coincided with these sessions).

The great majority of the teachers said that they only used Microsoft-based and Internet software such as Internet Explorer in their teaching. A few also used learn-to-type programmes and various games, but none mentioned LNL-specific Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) programmes of the type reviewed in our literature review. Four teachers mentioned that they had access to a few computer-based literacy, numeracy and language programmes such as Write-on, Maths/Reading/Spelling Blaster, Word Attack and Issues in English. One teacher listed 15 specific computer programmes she had access to, including some of the ones already mentioned plus general computer games (such as the Carmen San Diego series) and some literacy programmes designed for children (The Game and Other Stories). This provider also had large numbers of non-computerised games and resource material.

Some of the teachers were very specific about what they used the computers for, such as driver licences, doing research (involving Internet searching and writing up the results of their findings) and were aware that “computers don’t suit everyone.” One teacher said that she preferred “good old [hand] writing” where students initially wrote their work long-hand and then subsequently transferred it on to a computer in the nearby computer suite.

Asked how they used the computers in their programme, another teacher gave this explanation:

  T: Yes it gets used, yeah usually there’s a list on the board and people can get up to use that computer, though we have a computer suite across the hallway with three other computers in it. That came up at our meeting [with the learners] to do a timetable for the use of that computer room and we tried to encourage people to work on the computers for half an hour three times a week as part of the programme and that’s where it’s good if they’ve got a piece of writing to process. I always like to have them getting some kind of writing.
  I: So they’re using it as a word processor?
  T: Yeah, usually, there’s no Internet access on those computers, if people need … we used to have computers which sort of opened further with Internet access with some filters and that didn’t turn out so well, so we filtered it to supervised access to the Internet for people who were searching for a certain topic and we do it.
  I: So you don’t have any maths software or literacy software?
  T: Yes, yes we do. We have, and people will use those kinds of things. That tall young man in particular, likes to use the games, I’m not actually that familiar with the games, because I don’t do a lot of work with them, but we’ve got a reasonable stack of maths games, grammar, vocab and spelling games, those are the things on the computer. I don’t use them much, but we do have a lot of people who worked with their driver’s licence, and we support them in that by supplying road codes, test sheets and the CD, the road code. So they will spend time using the CD and familiarising themselves with that, the stuff that’s in the road code - quite a few people were spending quite a bit of time doing that and that’s all literacy stuff so yeah.