The Effect of Cooperative Learning and Direct Instruction in Improving Student’s Reading Comprehension Levels for Junior High School Students A. Background of the study Language is a means of communication. People use it to express their minds and ideas. It is important for us to learn language especially English since it used to communicate among nation in the world. English are divided into four skills that are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Those four skills are included into two larger skills they are receptive skill and productive skill. Firstly, the step to learn the language is through the receptive skill, then continue it with productive skill. Receptive skill are include listening and reading, while productive skill are writing and speaking. Here, this study will focus on how students comprehending reading. Learning a language especially English, students are should be able to comprehend the text first. Reading is one of language skills which have very complex process. It is a learning process of transferring information from writer to the reader by using written form. Rahmin (2005:3) states that reading is an information process from the text readers’ knowledge which the first function in make a sentence. It may also be defined as a learning to recognize the printed symbols that represent language and to respond intellectually and emotionally from the text while reading. Since English starts to be taught, most Senior and Junior High School students get difficulty in reading text which is used in reading content area. Many research results indicated that the ability of Indonesian high school students to read English text is very low (Hamra, et al, 2010:28). Not infrequently, the teacher still finds some of the distress that students experience in reading, especially for Junior High School students. They have many reasons for that problem, such as the text is too long, not interesting with the subject or the teacher, they cannot understand content of the text, lack of vocabulary, etc.