are useful for dialogue because we as a teacher can manipulate many of them to appear as if they are speaking Norton 1980: 77.
2.5 Characteristic of junior high school students
Junior high school student is included in intermediate level student. They are between 12 and 14 years old. In this level, students can participate in short
conversations, ask and answer questions; besides, find alternative ways to convey meaning, solicit information from others, and more Brown 2001: 109.
Intermediate levels should be treated with a good and simple way which makes students enjoy in it.
Intermediate level students are characterized by the speaker’s ability to ask and answer questions, initiating and responding simple statements, and
maintain face to face conversation, although in a highly restricted manner and with much linguistic inaccuracy Brown 2001: 100. Those highly restricted
manner and much linguistic inaccuracy are usually caused by the teacher’s way in teaching. Teachers usually use teaching way which is not easy to be understood
by the students.
2.6 Teaching Transactional and Interpersonal conversation using puppets for the eight grades of junior high school.
Harmer 1998: 88 says that ‘good speaking activities can and should be highly motivating. If all students participate fully- and if the teacher has set up the
activity properly and can then give sympathetic and useful feedback- they will get tremendous satisfaction from it’.
Transactional and interpersonal conversation is a kind of conversation. We know that if we learn conversation, it means that we learn how to talk to other
person with certain language. If we teach conversation to the intermediate level, we will find some
problems like limited vocabularies, high restricted manner, linguistic inaccuracy, etc Brown 2001. But, in teaching transactional and interpersonal conversation,
we as a teacher usually faced two certain problems. Those problems become writer’s focus in this study. First, the junior high school students usually do not
know what response to give when they do transactional and interpersonal conversations. Second, they are still confused in turn taking when they do
transactional and interpersonal conversation. Then, Matthews 1994 adds that a very important skill in a discussion is efficient turn taking where you need to
know to get your turn at speaking and also give others a chance to speak. Actually, transactional and interpersonal conversations are a little trickier for
learners because they can involve some or all of the factors like a casual register’s difference, colloquial language’s difference, slang’s difference, etc Brown 2001:
274. It meant that English is a foreign language for the students so they always find difficulty like the way of speaking, the words that usually used in certain
situation, and informal language that usually used in informal conversation. Some of them only know a little bit formal words and chunks. By seeing these problems,
we should find other strategies in teaching these two kinds of conversations. Then,
