The final project is about the use of small group discussion in improving students’ reading comprehension. The objective of this research is to find out whether small group discussion is effective to improve students’ reading comprehension in explanation text of the eleventh grade students of MAN Demak or not. The method of this research was quasi experimental design because it did not use the random sample. The sample of this research consisted of 39 students of class XI MIA 3 as the experimental class and 40 students of class XI MIA 4 as the control class. Pretest and Posttest to the experimental and the control classes were used to get the data. There were three steps used in this research. These were pretest, treatment, and posttest. The result of this research shows that the pretest mean score of experimental class was 59.58 and the pretest mean score of control group was 59.67. After giving treatment for six meeting for experimental class, the posttest mean score of experimental class was 71.66 and that the control class was 59.9 .The result of the analysis showed that there was a significant difference. It was supported by t-test result, the significant difference in the result of posttest between experimental and control classes was 0.000, it was lower than 0.05. Therefore, it could be concluded that H0 was rejected and H1 was accepted which means that the use of small group discussion was effective to improve students’ reading comprehension.

Keywords: Small Group Discussion, Reading Comprehension, and Explanation text.