Teaching pronunciation

I've been reading up recently on teaching pronunciation and it opened up a whole new world to me. During the past to weeks I managed to look at sentence stress, strong and weak forms and elision with some of my classes. That's alone a great improvement because I increasingly treat pronunciation as an integral part of my classes. Moreover, I'm getting able to explain things when they crop up.

Two examples worth remembering. First, I was watching part of Notting Hill with an upper intermediate student (he's been in that class on his own for some 2 months now) and told him then to pick a line from the film and transcribe it for me in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). He picked

'The guinea fowl is proving more difficult than expected.'

and it gave me a further opportunity to work on sentence stress and how the words are linked together. I focused on 'than expected' and rather than using the IPA again to point out the weak form of 'than' I decided to play around with word boundaries and pointed out that the chunk is pronounced as 'the nexpected'. It worked fabulously well...

Second, I had some 8-year-olds saying 'BAnanas' as if the word was stressed on the first syllable. Obviously, with this class I couldn't use the IPA nor get into the idea of word stress so I simply told them to pronounce it as two words 'b nanas' and they were immediately able to produce the word correctly!

Some good stuff on this topic:
Teaching Rhythm and stress in English to Chinese students
3-part series on Linking, Rhythm and Intonation and Stress