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Figure 2. Prosody pyramid based on the work of Bolinger (1989), Cutler (2015), Derwing and Munro (2015), and Gilbert (2012).

If you help your students absorb a threshold command of the prosody pyramid system (including the contrastive function of schwa), they will have a strong base to learn other aspects of English pronunciation (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. The English system of contrastive clarity.

English calls attention to the focus words by three basic signals: extra clarity, extra length, and a marked pitch change. Focus words convey new information (what hasn’t already been talked about). See Figure 4 for an example of the focus changing as a conversation continues. It is crucial that learners are able to hear/process those signals.