This study examines the charateristics of the rate of diffusion of computers for education in comparison with that for other educational equipments and the factors responsible for the diffusion of computers. Computers are being widespread quite drastically compared with other educational equipments. Among different levels of schools the increase in the diffusion rate is most keen for elementary schools, to which computers were introduced last, and thus the difference in the rates for prefectures is biggest for this category. The basic difference in the spread of computers and other kinds of equipments is that the former is influenced by ideological factors such as positive stance to educational innovation while practical factors such as purchasing power of communities are mostly responsible for the latter. It can be said that the reason why practical factors do not affect the spread of computers so much is that computers have just started to be introduced to elementary and lower secondary scools, and because the attitude toward educational innovation is reflected in the practical aspect in terms of policies of the administration. Under these circumstances what is effective in the promotion of the diffusion of educational computing is administrative support or, to be concrete, schemes to promote educational computing by the prefecture and national levels. However, problems such as development of software and training of teachers are involved in the introduction of computers. The improvement of hardware and decrease in the price are taking place at a high speed. What is likely to happen is that by the time teachers get used to computers the machines are outdated and software and peripherals compatible with them are not available any more. Educational Computing is costly. In order to make it effective it is inevitable to fully discuss the plans for software development and the training system for teachers before actually adapting computers.

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Recently, it has been stressed that informatic Education is not just to study functions and operations of one specific media, specifically in primary school. To study them should be minimized even if being necessary and the media must be used as a tool for problem-solving. Activities such as collecting data, creating data-base, examing the importance of the data, reconstructing and exchanging of imformation were introduced and examined. The curriculum based on the activities was also provided. The expected children's behaviors and the imformation processing abilities were classified. The characteristic of this classification is that the abilities are not directly related to skills of the operations. Complex Media System that was constituted by "Compu Note" and VTR was used for children's learning. Children in two schools (rural and urban areas) studied their towns and exchanged imformation by using "Compu Note" and VTR. The result showed that, the children participated in the lessons actively, but some problems in operating "Compu Note" were also found. The succession to the further study and the methods of evaluation should be carefully examined in the future.

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There are two components which consist of ability of reading pictorial message. One is peculier useful ability to view pictures, the other is common necessary ability to read various materials (for example, books, pictures, and so on). The latter is more necessary than the former for reading pictorial message. Reading process contains two types reading. One type is reading to recognize and comprehend the sender's message, which the author call "informative reading". The other type is reading to interpret what the receivers recognize and comprehend as the sender's message and or to interpret events which is presented in the picture, which the author call "creative reading". A educational goal of development of student's ability of reading pictorial message at secondary school level is to promote "creative reading" based upon "informative reading". The author tried to examine what the development of student's ability shoud be in school by an experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to examine the following questions : When one read two types of pictorial message. 1) does difference of picture's type bring him (her) different type of reading? 2) does his (her) attitude toward reading influence his (her) reading type? 3) what type of picture bring him (her) "creative reading" ? Conclusions of the experiment as follows: 1) Difference of picture's type showed a tendency to bring him (her) different type of reading. 2) "Creative reading" is brought by asking and answering to himself (herself) repeatedly about what he (she) recognize and comprend as the sender's message or events which is presented in the picture. 3) Teh pictures which promote "creative reading" is the ones which tends to attract receiver's question about what he (she) recognize and comprehend as sender's message or events which is presented in the picture. They are pictures which convey messages different from his (her) previous information, or pictures of which codes almost break away from existing stereo-typed codes.

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The majority of cables in Japan are laid on a medium or small-scale, that is a trend of cables in the long run and they are mostly only rebroadcasting. The cables which broadcast for themselves are comparatively few yet, but self-broadcasting is specially characteristic of cables with relation to the areas. What programs can cables produce as selfbroadcasting and what part can they play to the areas? These problems are considered from the point of public character in this paper. Public (municipal) cables do their part as administration media. Here public character in cables means that it concerns for all residents in the area, for fair services to them and for contribution to their life. The contents of self-broadcasting programs which public cables produce are classified as follows: public informations, life activities, areas, industries, self-government, education, culture, tastes and recreations. First of all, the programs concerning self-government shows the remarkable and important feature of public cables. The programs relaying from local assembly and committee, suggest that residents should indirectly participate in self-government. Also there is a public access program. Residents freely take part in programming and appear on the stage. The programs contain mainly various music and sports and become a target of residents' interest. Furthermore if they discuss the problems concerning their life areas in the program, cables would be useful to put right the ill effect involved in one-sided administration. Education and culture programs have always a audience rating of high level. A growing interest in school education and a strong desire for self-teaching of residents, are showed everywhere and so public cables need to furnish them with the chance and place for meeting their wishes. Therefore it is desired for cables to make social institutions of education join actively and also to make men of talent who can give date and advices, participate willingly. And in coporation with it the research into the residents opinion, taste, and concern, and the firm grasp of their trends are necessary. Residents participation in commercial cables is welcomed as well as in public cables. Even in the programs sponsored by enterprise, their activities on culture and social welfare would promote the affluence of social life. Some commercial cables produce the programs with theme of cultural goods and events of the year in the areas and those programs are widely used in other cables. City-type cables which have many channels of self-broadcasting, provide children the programs of juvenile play and provide adults with the ones of science, arts and taste respectively. In reality commercial cables have many problems difficult to solve in self-broadcasting but they must establish their own position in area by demonstrating fully their public character mentioned above.

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In the foreign language classroom, the acquisition of vocabulary is basically left up to the individual student's rote memorization. Even if the audio-lingual approach (in which emphasis is placed on drills and practices) is employed, the memorization of vocabulary is still required mainly as part of the student's homework. Thus, it is the responsibility of the student to acquire as much vocabulary as he can, in whatever manner possible. For this reason, improving methods of vocabulary acquisition has been one of the important problems in foreign language learning. In the facilitation of vocabulary acquisition, there are several methods within which what is referred to as mnemonics; for example, the method of loci, the pegword method and the keyword method. The method of loci is one type of mnemonics whereby learners memorize words by applying them to places with which they are familiar: their houses, buildings within their hometown, and so on. A pegword is a word which rhymes with a number, such as "one" for "bun", "two" for "shoe", etc., and the learner tries to memorize the words in a list by means of association between the number in the list and the pegwords. A keyword is defined as a word or a phrase in the learner's native language which is similar in sound to one in the foreign language (target language). Vocabulary learning by the keyword method consists of two parts: one is association by sound between a keyword and a word of target language, and the other is association by image between them. Much previous research supports the effectiveness of the keyword method although further research is still necessary to improve it. Problems, such as whether the keyword method is effective with advanced learners as well as with beginners, whether or not keywords with some aids like vocalized short sentences or pictures are more effective than keywords only, or what parts of speech are most appropriate for the keyword method, still remain. The purpose of this study is to investigate those problems. Method The experiment was conducted in September, 1988. One hundred sixty-six male high school juniors served as subjects. Sixty-four English words were selected; 16 nouns high in concreteness, 16 nouns low in concreteness, 16 adjectives and 16 verbs. The nouns were chosen based on concreteness, imagery and meaningfulness values, and adjectives and verbs were selected based on frequency. The 64 words were randomized and arranged in a booklet, one word on each page. Four types of learning tasks were introduced: First, memorization of words without keywords; second, memorization of words with written keywords by the experimenters; third, memorization of words with keywords in addition to vocalized short sentences (which helped image link between the Japanese keyword and the English words); fourth, memorization of words with a keyword in addition to a picture (which helped the image link between them). All these tasks were paced, instructed and administered by tape. Subjects were given 15 seconds a word, and required to write the meaning of English words in Japanese as an immediate test. The same type of retention test was administered one week later. Results and Discussion The results of this experiment supported the following three points. First, the keyword method is significantly effective for advanced foreign language learners in terms of retention,(though the keyword method did not show any advantage in the immediate test). Second, a keyword was more effective when it was presented with a vocalized short sentence or a picture (which helped the meaningful association between a Japanese keyword and an English word) than when presented alone. From this result, some training to memorize words by use of use of keywords was necessary for learners to make this method facilitate vocabulary acquisition. The learner's

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