Finally, we would like to make some closing comments on what we see as the most important themes to emerge from this study.
Firstly, literacy, numeracy and language is a challenging field in which to work. Conditions and support services are rarely optimal and in addition, literacy, numeracy and language learners are educationally some of the most challenging people to teach. Our observations and the feedback from the teachers underlined the extent of the social and educational issues that many of these learners have.
Secondly, we were constantly reminded of the teachers’ commitment, empathy and support for their learners. What keeps these people involved in this sector is their strong belief in the value of what literacy, numeracy and language programmes offer and the intrinsic interest of what they do in their jobs. For some of these teachers, the sense of commitment means that they regularly go ‘beyond the call of duty’ in order to help their students.
Thirdly, LNL is a truly diverse sector. Although we deliberately chose 15 teachers in a range of contexts, we were still aware of diversity across a number of dimensions:
Fourthly, generic teaching and classroom management skills play a significant role in literacy, numeracy and language teaching. Our study has shown not only the high incidence of these elements, but also their importance in the teaching process. In this regard, we identified the management of equitable participation in teaching activities, the balance between teacher and learner participation, balancing support and challenge, affirmation, metacognition skills, the gradation and sequencing of content and especially questioning all to be worthy of note.
Fifthly, we did not see as many deliberate acts of literacy, numeracy and language teaching, whether as stand-alone or in response to errors or omissions, that we had expected to see. This finding is entirely consistent with overseas observational studies.
Sixthly, the range of teaching methods, both generic and LNL-related, was not very extensive. The teachers appeared to rely heavily on a small number of methods and did not indicate awareness of many alternatives in their interviews.
Finally, integrated literacy, numeracy and language programmes are still very much an unknown factor in literacy, numeracy and language provision. Our study has shown that in some integrated programmes there is very little specific teaching of literacy, numeracy and language skills, but others manage to intersperse literacy, numeracy and language teaching into the teaching of non-literacy, numeracy and language curricula. This finding may have been unduly influenced by the short duration of our observations, but certainly warrants further research investigation.