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My middle school splits the grades up into Advanced, Intermediate, Basic. I've been teaching Advanced and Basic (7th grade). Advanced is solid, and they can do the textbook that I have been given. Basic is just...really not that great. I had to re-teach them how to tell time, some don't even know the alphabet, and its just an overall mess. Sometimes I just want to send them back to Elementary school!! 

Whoops, didn't even answer your question...but yeah, if I had to pinpoint anything, in regards to my Basic classes, emphasize everything? They really don't know anything.
My advanced classes are fine, they must've been going to Hagwons or something.

My first year students that just came in could school the majority of the third grade students that just left to go to high school.  Seriously love my new kids.  Maybe though I'm just getting the beginning wave of hagwon babies. But also I know the teacher at the elementary school is good at his job and doing the right thing.

I would say elementary students need improvement on sentence construction.  They leave out conjunctions, articles, and auxillary verbs.... (However, I will say Korean speakers of English do this a lot generally but are still understandable.)

Some of them don't have the confidence, or have not tried hard enough/ or had the best instruction, to say more than "I am fine and you/ I am great (etc)." 

I think the textbook material in elementary school is fun for students but it is not really teaching them more than quick plug-and-use phrases... they are not really learning how to build English sentences this way... But maybe that is what our job should be as middle school teachers.  I feel that it is one of my goals for the students here...

I also teach at 3 different elementary schools (all grades, except K), just started in March, so it is interesting to see what material students learn in elementary. 

I think unless students go to hagwons, they are not encouraged to / or use, English outside of the 40 - 45 minute class in public school.  This is not enough, they need to have practice outside of school... that is why it is so nice to see students around my town and strike up a conversation with them if possible. 

I agree that elementary kids need to work on sentence construction. But I also think that the students language ability has a lot to do with their age & grade!
i.e. I have full on conversations with my elementary kids all the time! But when I try and talk to middle-school kids, they all look at me as if I'm speaking French!
They just seem to lose interest in speaking English when they hit middle-school - while in elementary school they are still super enthusiastic!
I do also think that there is quite a big jump from the elementary textbooks to the middle-school text books.
When I ran into one of my ex-6th grade students the other day, I felt like he couldn't speak English whereas he had been one of my best students!
When I asked him how English was in middle-school, he told me that it was very, very difficult, & he didn't understand.   

From my little experience, English skills seem to be improving with the younger ones. Thanks! Given the huge variation among students, I can't say what special topic is worth a focus... sorry.

BUT, classroom participation would be an invaluable habit I'd love to see in my upcoming students. Most middle school kids naturally become less cooperative and excitable, but when students start off participating in the beginning, I think a teacher can at least use it as a precedent and keep some momentum going with class. Starting with already comatose students bodes very poorly.