Glossary audiolingual teaching

Pronunciation Elementary
The most likely cause of problem at this level, as with beginners, is poor use of stress unstressed syllables, and lack of conceptual understanding of the role stressed syllables play for English listeners. You’ll want to work on discrimination and production of stress with them in much the same ways as you do with beginners, as we will see in a moment.
Sometimes you get a learner whose stress is not too bad, but who is still very difficult to understand. You may have to listen carefully, preferably with a tape recorder, to figure out the causes of their problems – it could be constantly leaving consonants off the ends of words; it could be not distinguishing vowel length so there is constant confusion about which vowel is intended; or it could be a mixture of different problems; or it could be ‘higher level’ issues such a speaking very quickly, having very poor phrasing, or using inappropriate intonation.
Pronunciation Intermediate
It’s likely learners at this level understand, at least intuitively, about word stress, though they may still use incorrect stress on a number of words. They may have more problems with sentence stress. They may have problems of speaking too fast or too slow, or of adding lots of ‘aahh’ or ‘eerrrr’ noises in inappropriate places. They may still leave off a significant number of consonants, or mix up a lot of vowel distinctions.
Pronunciation Advanced
We won’t be talking too much about pronunciation advanced learners here, but for completeness, these are the ones who are easy to understand at the sentence level but may need help with extended speech, such as reporting at meetings, giving instructions, or delivering a speech. Or they may be more concerned with conversational speech – how to get the colloquialisms and contractions right. Or they may want to ‘reduce their accent’ – try to gain a more native-like way of speaking.
14.2. Stress and intonation
It is very likely you will want to work on prosody with intermediate learners, since this is one of the most important aspects of English pronunciation, especially for students who have progressed beyond the level of words and short sentences, and need to produce more continuous discourse.
There are a number of ways of teaching prosody, and there are successful pronunciation curricula that focus mainly on intonation. However, the communicative approach favors teaching prosody through a focus on stress, rather than directly on intonation. This is not because intonation is considered unimportant, or even that it is considered less important than stress. It is due to considerations of Metalinguistics communication.
This does not preclude you from mentioning other aspects of speech if this seems relevant and helpful.
If you do this, try to test the effectiveness of what you do as objectively as possible in terms of real improvement in learners’ pronunciation, and try also to record your successes so that these can be generalized and extended.