______________________________________________________________________________________ ENHANCING STUDENTS’ CRITICAL READING SKILLS THROUGH GROUP 25 DISCUSSION IN COOPERATIVE LEARNING Idha Nurhamidah ENHANCING STUDENTS’ CRITICAL READING SKILLS THROUGH GROUP DISCUSSION IN COOPERATIVE LEARNING Idha Nurhamidah College of Languages-Unissula Abstract This study aims to find out whether or not group discussion is effective to enhance students’ critical reading ability. The subjects were 64 students who were divided into two groups; one consisting of 32 students assigned as the experimental group, and the other consisting of 32 students as the control group. The experimental group studied critical reading through group discussion while the control group studied critical reading through a conventional way. Both groups were taught for 12 sessions, each lasting for 90 minutes. The data were collected by means of critical reading test. In the study, it was hypothesized that there was a significant difference between the critical reading ability of the students taught by employing group discussion activities and those taught employing a conventional way. The result of the t-test was 5.84 while the t-table was 3.6. It indicated that group discussion activities had improved the students’ critical reading ability significantly. Key words: academic reading, critical reading A. Introduction Critical reading has become of a primary concern among English lecturers at Higher Education, particularly in the English Department for it plays an important role in the success of the students’ studies. The fact is that English Department students are assigned to critically read to complete the research or final project in English, for their undergraduate degrees. It is, therefore, critical reading is considered to be an absolutely important skill that should be acquired by the students. Unfortunately, most students consider critical reading as a daunting task that it is hard to read a text in great details and to organize ideas out of it into different texts of their own. They often get confused and are quite frustrated at the moment confronted with complex reading materials. They take a long time to get ideas and organize them into an acceptable reading presentation . They seem to be unproductive in this kind of situation; even when they try to speak, their final product of academic reading tends to be very poor with wrong choice of expression, wrong pronunciation, etc.. It is admitted by most lecturers that the students’ inability to speak considerably well is due to the method employed. In general lecturers use teacher- centered method where instruction is completely managed and controlled by the teacher in which he or she simply gives some topics to discuss—and if the students are silent, the teacher then talks instead about the topic. This technique, to some extent is no longer applicable for the teaching of academic reading and therefore the shift to a more student- centered method is needed. In student-centered method, students are more active in the process of teaching learning. Cooperative Learning employed in critical reading activities is a technique of teaching that corresponds to such a shift. In this technique, classroom is