the advent of computers and the internet
Since the advent of computers and the internet, technology has always played a huge role in the classroom. Because of the increasing significance of technology in education, it has become a significant area of interest for researchers. Furthermore, with today’s high rate of student diversity, including immigrants and American natives, technology is an integral part of ESL teaching. Technology has, therefore, been integrated into ESL learning, including vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension, and writing, all of which determine the performance of students taking ESL classes. However, little is known on how the use of technology affects the performance of students in ESL. The general objective of this research is to examine the perceptions of ESL teachers on the role of technology in the classroom to improve student’s performance. To meet this general objective, this research has two specific research objectives. First, it intends to determine the cause of the low performance of students in learning ESL. Second, this research paper attempts to determine how effective the use of technology is in supporting and enhancing student performance. The researcher will use qualitative methods and specifically online interviews for data collection. While the researcher initially intended to use face-to-face interviews, the situation created by the COVID-19 makes online semi-structured interviews effective for collecting the needed data. All data will be collected from a case study of a secondary school in Mongolia. With purposeful sampling, the researcher intends to interview eight teachers from secondary school on their perceptions on technology in ESL teaching and student performance. However, while purposeful sampling is an effective qualitative technique especially for a case study, the existence of personal relationships between the researcher and colleagues at the school might compromise the objectivity of respondents. To ensure the credibility and validity of the data collected, the researcher intends to conduct dependability, consistency, confirmability and transferability tests on the findings of this exercise. From the data collection exercise, this research paper seeks to find adequate valid and credible data on the main causes of low performance among ESL students as well as the perceptions of ESL teachers on how technology supports and enhances student performance. Upon completion of the research, the findings will be useful in numerous ways. First, considering low performance of ESL students at the school, this research will reveal the reasons as to why ESL students perform worse than their native English speaking counterparts. An understanding of these reasons will pave the way to improve or mitigate the poorer performance among this group of students and will further inform school policy for ESL learning today and in the future. The results will further be useful in clarifying the effectiveness of use of technology in supporting and enhancing student performance. This research paper will reveal which of the technologies used in the school are the most effective in delivering the desired results. With insight on the effective technology for ESL teaching and learning, the findings from this research will similarly inform the technology policy for the school concerning ESL students.