The effect of using Jigsaw I on the reading comprehension achievement of junior high school students

As one of the essential skills, reading has an important role in improving students’ knowledge. Reading helps students to sharpen their language skills. Simply mastering English language isn’t enough; students need to know the strategy how to absorb written information effectively which this type of reading strategy is learned in reading classes. This study was focusing more in junior high school students’ disinterest in joining reading class. Meanwhile, junior high school is believed as one of crucial phases of transition experienced by the learners from learning basic knowledge to the ones which are more complicated. Unfortunately, most of the teachers teaching junior high school find it hard to arouse students’ interest in reading such texts. Meanwhile, to measure students’ understanding in reading, they must be able to answer comprehension questions related to the text given. There are some methods which are useful to help teachers arouse students’ interest in reading and help students to increase their score in doing comprehension task. There is a method called cooperative learning which is believed can be used to help students perform better in doing reading comprehension task. One of the techniques that can be used is Jigsaw I. The purpose of this study was to find out whether there was any significant difference between the reading comprehension achievements of grade seven students before and after they were taught reading using Jigsaw I technique. This was a pre-experimental study using pre-test and post-test. The subjects were the grade seven students in one of public junior high schools in Surabaya. The writer did the treatments four times with different themes for each meeting. After the treatments had been done, the writer analyzed and calculated the data using T-test. The result showed that there was a significant difference between the reading comprehension achievements of the students before and after being taught reading using Jigsaw 1 technique. The mean of the pre-test and post-test score showed a significant improvement, which were 68.7 and 85.6. For the to calculation, the finding of the calculation is 11,12. The finding is much higher than the t-table which is 2,048. The Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted. The result of the study is that there is a significant difference between the reading comprehension achievements of the students before and after they were taught reading using Jigsaw I