This activity is based off of the conversation between Meg and Kaito on page 115 of New Horizon 2. Even if your school does not use New Horizon, this is an activity you can easily do with any middle school class provided that their English level is up to task.
The topic of conversation (inviting a friend to a concert) is an interesting and realistic conversation to have, however, simply having the kids repeat this dialogue is boring and unengaging. So, what were going to do here to spice things up a bit is replace the fictional "Midori Music Festival" with real artists and give students some agency in making their own dialogue (see attached).
Start out by printing some "tickets" for a couple artists concerts. This is alot easier than it sounds. The ticket can just be a small piece of paper with the artist / groups name on it. If you are the artsy type you can make it way more legit but this is optional. You should pick 4-5 artists / groups and print out enough for however many students are in your class. I try to choose aritsts / groups that I know students know and are into which unfortunatley ends up being Korean boy bands. Once you've made the tickets, throw them in a bag.
Before the activity starts you will go around the class and have each student pull one ticket randomly from the bag. Make sure the students don't show anyone else their ticket cus this will ruin the activity. I tell students to imagine that they are a hugeee fan of whatever group / artist ticket they pulled but are not interested in seeing any other artists. The goal of this activity is to find someone to go to a concert with (aka someone who is a fan of the same aritst as you). So if someone invites you out to any other concert besides the group you are a fan of, you make some excuse and say you can't go. Before having the students actually walk around and invite each other to concerts, I give them a couple of minutes to think about what their excuse is going to be if they are invited to a concert they don't want to go to. I've seen everything from mild "Oh, I have to do my homeowork" to wild "oh, my mom died", to outright confusing "oh, I have to eat hamburgers that day" so this can get pretty interesting.
The last step to do before commencing the activity is to run through the dialoge quickly just to make sure the students know what they're supposed to say and how to pronouce it .
During the activity I walk around the classroom to make sure the students are doing the dialogue properly instead of just showing each other their tickets. I usually do two rounds of this activity. For the first round I tell students to go back to their seats once they find one person to go to the concert with them and for the second round I ask them to try and find all of the people who are fans of the same group as themselves.
The dialogue in the power point is not word-for-word the same as that on p.115 as I tweaked it to make it seem a bit more natural. Feel free to make your own dialogue if you want to add your own twist to it.
Enjoy!