Abstract The purpose of this paper was to investigate how cooperative strategies, jigsaw, affect reading comprehension. The experiment was conducted on 40 pre-intermediate students in two institutes in Sannandaj. First of all, the instructor ga the students' level and to assign them into experimental and control group. The experimental group used cooperative method in which they were divided into four groups of five students and used Jigsaw reading. Students in the control group didn’t participate in cooperative method; they read the given text individually. In each session and after applying the treatment a posttest was administered and the results were analyzed through SPSS 16. This procedure went on for twelve sessions. A pretest was given in the first session and in the following sessions post tests were administered). The amount of t-value in the ninth session was bigger the critical value at %95 confidence interval and the amount of probability was smaller than 0.05, so this value was critically significant. Therefore, the results revealed that Jigsaw technique affected students' comprehension in the experimental group significantly. Moreover, the instructor noticed that using a pre-test to determine this technique motivates the students to participate in class activities. This made them more active. .
