  We discuss the rest-frame ultraviolet emission line spectra of a large (~100)
sample of low luminosity redshift z~3.1 Lyman alpha emitters (LAEs) drawn from
a Subaru imaging survey in the SSA22 survey field. Our earlier work based on
smaller samples indicated that such sources have high [OIII]/[OII] line ratios
possibly arising from a hard ionising spectrum that may be typical of similar
sources in the reionisation era. With optical spectra secured from VLT/VIMOS,
we re-examine the nature of the ionising radiation in a larger sample using the
strength of the high ionisation diagnostic emission lines of CIII]1909,
CIV1549, HeII1640, and OIII]1661,1666 in various stacked subsets. Our analysis
confirms earlier suggestions of a correlation between the strength of Ly-alpha
and CIII] emission and we find similar trends with broad band UV luminosity and
rest-frame UV colour. Using various diagnostic line ratios and our stellar
photoionisation models, we determine both the gas phase metallicity and
hardness of the ionisation spectrum characterised by xi_ion - the number of
Lyman continuum photons per UV luminosity. We confirm our earlier suggestion
that xi_ion is significantly larger for LAEs than for continuum-selected Lyman
break galaxies, particularly for those LAEs with the faintest UV luminosities.
We briefly discuss the implications for cosmic reionisation if the metal-poor
intensely star-forming systems studied here are representative examples of
those at much higher redshift.
