TEACHING READING BY USING JIGSAW TECHNIQUE FOR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTSRN(AN EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH AT THE SECOND GRADE STUDENTS OF SMPN BANDA ACEH)

Cooperative learning is a learning model that prioritizes cooperation among students in groups to achieve learning objectives. Cooperative learning model bas several techniques, including Jigsaw technique. By applying this technique, it is expected that students' learning outcomes in understanding reading text will be improved. Therefore, the researcher is interested to conduct a research under the title "Teaching Reading by Using Jigsaw Technique for Junior High School Students". This study is intended to find out whether teaching reading by using jigsaw can improve the student's reading ability in understanding a reading text. The research population of this study consisted of all students at SMP Negeri I Banda Aceh. The researcher took only one class, consisting 30 students as the sample of this study. The methodology used in this research is quantitative experimental research and also referred as pretest posttest design. In measuring the reading ability of the students, the researcher gave pretest to know the ability of the sample before the treatment. The test consisted of 20 questions which are related to reading comprehension questions, constructing sentences and filling in the blanks. Then the researcher gave the treatment for four meetings, the researcher taught the students by using jigsaw technique. After the treatment, the researcher gave the posttest to know the affect of the treatment. Based on the result of this study, the researcher found that teaching reading by using jigsaw can improve students' ability in understanding reading text. It can be seen from the result of statistical analysis that shows the mean score of pretest is 60.66 and the mean of posttest is 77.83, the different between those two means were quite significant. After analyzing all the data, the researcher discussed some finding. The value of T-score is 4.737 while the critical value of T-table at level significances 0.05 and 0.01 with degree of freedom (df) 29 are 1.699 and 2.462 for one tail test. It can be seen that T-score (4.737) is higher than T-table (1.699 and2.462) and it means that null hypothesis (Ho) is rejected and alternative hypothesis (Ha) is accepted. In other words, the use of jigsaw technique can improve student's ability in reading skill