ABSTRACTThe objectives of this research are: (1) to know whether Student TeamsAchievement Divisions (STAD) can improve the students’ reading ability and (2)to know what happens when STAD is implemented in teaching reading in theclassroom. This study used a classroom action research design.The research was conducted from April until June 2013 consisiting of twocycles. Each cycle consists of three meetings. Every cycle consists of four steps:planning the action, implementing the action, observing the action and reflectingthe result of observation. The participants of this research were the students ofclass VII C of SMP N 5 Surakarta. There were 32 students which consisted of 14males and 18 females. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected by theresearcher. The techniques of collecting the data are using qualitative andquantitative data. The qualitative data consisted of observation, interview,document, questionnaire, photograph and test. While the quantitative data was thestudents’ test score.Based on all the data collected as the research findings, it can be shown thatSTAD could improve the students’ reading ability and the classroom atmospherein teaching and learning process. The improvement was shown by the students’score. They could understand the indicators of reading: stating main idea,determining the purpose of the text, identifying detail information, guessingmeaning word, and identifying reference. As the result, the students’ mean scoreimproved: pre-test 57.50 increased to 67.50 in post-test 1, and 80.16 in post-test2.The improvement of classroom atmosphere was also gained among other things,they are: students were motivated and interested in learning reading in the class,the students were paid attention during teaching and learning process and theytended to be active in the class while work together in teams.