Modern technology provides lots of opportunities in order to connect classrooms with the world. Technology provides a greater and better source of information, yet solutions are needed to be mediated through the appropriate remedy. The emergence of new technology and digital resources during the past few decades has significantly influenced the learning environment and educational prospects. However, one of the challenges of practitioners and researchers is preparing learners with the required skills for the effective use of modern technology in the process of learning. Researchers proposed that a combination of societal constructivism and technology-integrated learning is crucial for obtaining and accomplishing present-day academic goals. The present paper highlights the significance and intricacy of modern technology, specifically digital storytelling (DST), in education. It elaborates the most salient aspects of DST application in language education, considering phases and elements of effective digital stories, steps of composing a digital story, and a critical description on the implementation of DST and fosterage of academic performance.

Advances of modern technology in education, specifically in language education render a large amount of easy-access recourses, knowledge and information to language learners. Therefore, it is essential to train students who value autonomous and self-directed learning; i.e. learners who are responsible for their own learning process, style, progress and evaluation. Students learn a lot of things and obtaining plenty of knowledge from various resources which affect different aspects of their daily life including decision making; thus, self-directed learning (SDL) has a significant role in academic life nowadays; students can learn independently from using their own experiences and other available sources. The present paper investigates the importance of self-directed learning in education, specifically in language teaching-learning processes and it highlights the main features of SDL and technology relation, SDL and linguistic enhancement and SDL implementation requirements.

The study presents a contrastive analysis of two distinct sound systems, namely, those of Persian and English. It provides a descriptive analysis and a contrastive study of consonants and vowels of these languages, expatiating on the similar and dissimilar features of the two sound systems. Dissimilarities are especially important since they may result in production of deviant sounds by foreign language learners.

Code-switching and code-mixing are considered dynamic conversational phenomena in interpersonal interactions, that is an alteration between two or more languages, dialectal variants, language registers, and it is an effective communicative strategy which Persian-English bilinguals consider a genuine thing in their ordinary speech practice. The focus of the present study is on the structural analysis of reverse code-switching between Persian and English that are known to be referred to two typologically different languages. Participants of the present research, all late bilinguals, reported on frequent use of code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) in everyday language practice. CS/CM is quite normal and frequent among Iranian bilinguals, especially in informal settings where bilingual speakers can freely switch between their languages. Furthermore, the results revealed that Iranian bilinguals switch from English to Persian and in verso mostly at the lexical and the phrasal levels (intrasentential switching mode), but less frequently at the clausal or the sentence level (intersentential switching mode). The research states that there are some restrictions on inserting English verbs into the Persian syntactic frame: the Persian language is thought to be the matrix language and the preverbal part comes from English as the embedded language, such incongruity between the morphosyntactic structure and the verbal system of the Persian and English languages impose some constraints on the occurrence of switching codes between the pair of the languages under study.

The main purpose of the present research is to test Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model with respect to Persian-English code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) to reveal if Persian-English CS is a case of "classic codeswitching" and to fi nd out whether Persian-English CS/CM confi rms the principles of the MLF model or not. The data of this paper was collected from the spontaneous formal and informal interaction of Iranian bilingual students, studying abroad. The three major principles of Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model, namely: (a) the morpheme order principle (b) the system morpheme principle, and (c) the uniform structure principle were precisely investigated in details. Based on the results of analyses, it was found out that Persian-English CS is a supporting evidence for the MLF model.