ENGLISH REVIEW: Journal of English Education ISSN 2301-7554 Vol. 3, Issue 2, June 2015 http://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ERJEE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF JIGSAW STRATEGY TO IMPROVE STUDENTS' SKILL IN WRITING A RECOUNT TEXT Iranita Sitohang Department of English Education, Faculty of Language and Literature Education, Indonesia University of Education Email: ira.leonie@hotmail.com) Pupung Purnawarman Department of English Education, Faculty of Language and Literature Education, Indonesia University of Education Email: purnawarman@upi.edu) APA Citation: Sitohang, I & Purnawarman, P. (2015). The effectiveness of jigsaw strategy to improve students' skill in writing a recount text. English Review: Journal of English Education, 3(2), 183-189 Received: 09-04-2015 Accepted: 25-04-2015 Published: 01-06-2015 Abstract: This study was intended to investigate the use of Jigsaw technique and the improvement of students’ skill in writing a recount text and their challenges in writing. It was conducted at a vocational high school in Bandung, involving students of eleventh grade as the participants using a quasi-experimental design. In this study, the data were obtained through questionnaires, pre- and post-tests. The data from the pre-test and the post-test were analyzed by using independent t-test. SPSS 20.0 program was used to do the statistical test. Based on the findings, it was revealed that the challenges faced by students in writing a recount text were the use of past tense, limited vocabulary, and the schematic structure of recount text. The quantitative finding of the study shows that significance value is lower than 0.05 (p = 0.000 < 0.05), which indicates that Jigsaw technique can improve students’ writing skill in the class investigated. Jigsaw helps students to deal with their inability of writing a recount text because each student supports each other member in the home group in order to gain their group’s achievement. In addition, Jigsaw helps students to gather more knowledge when sharing the information and knowledge of their part in the expert group. Keywords: jigsaw strategy, writing, recount text INTRODUCTION Learning English means learning four basic skills of the language: speaking, listening, reading and writing. The students should have abilities in reading and listening to support their speaking and writing. Grabe and Kaplan (1996, p. 5) stated that writing is particularly the most complex composing skill valued in the academy which involves training, instruction, practice, experience and purpose. Eventhough writing is often considered as a more difficult skill than other language skills, it still can be learned and mastered. In line with this, Langan (2008, p. 10) says that the more students practice writing, the better they will write. In the context of Indonesian school, writing is often directed toward writing a text. Based on the text structure or overall design, there are two different written texts: report and recount text (Feez & Joyce, 1998, p. 3). They further pointed out that recount text is designed to tell a series of events which happened