Importance Of Cooperative Reading

Reading’ is the general term which most people use it to name ‘Reading comprehension’ (Grabe, 2002). A definition by Snow (2002) stated that “reading is a process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language which entails three elements: the reader, the text, and the activity or the purpose for reading” (p. 11). Each reader provides his own purpose of reading a text in comparison with another reader therefore people may have different purposes for reading, some read it for general understanding, some for detailed understanding, some for amount of information and some readers for integrating information (Grade and Stoller, 2002).

Reading comprehension can improve through different strategies. Cooperative learning is one of the strategies which learners can implement to increase their reading comprehension. Cooperative learning is defined by Oslen and Kagan (1992) as "group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially-structured exchange of information between learners in groups, and in which each learner is held accountable for his or her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others" (p. 8). And some scholars mentioned it as an effective teaching method in EFL and ESL (Brown, 2004).

Moreover, we have another strategy which some scholars consider it as a parallel strategy with cooperative approach, which is called collaborative approach. However, practitioners