I am a professor in National University of San Martin in Tarapoto, I teach English phonetics and phonology.
An important purpose of the course is to explain how English is pronounced in the accent normally chosen as the standard for people learning English, and of course to present a general theory about speech sounds and how they are used in language, that is why this course we call ENGLISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY.
Students think that they will only practice listening and repeating English sounds through exciting and funny conversations but it's not true. It's important to explain to our students that it is necessary to learn theoretical background, because students need to understand the principles regulating the use of sounds in spoken English.
In any languse we can identify a small number of regularly used sounds (vowels and consonants) that we call PHONEMES.
Because of notoriously confusing nature of English spelling, it is particularly important to learn to think of English pronunciation in terms of phonemes rather than letters of the alphabet. We often use special symbols to represent speech sounds, using the symbols to represent each sounds, this we call TRANSCRIPTION.
After the phonemes of English, its important to teach to our students STRESS (the relative strength of a syllable) and INTONATION (the use of the pitch of the voice to convey meaning).
In STRESS we can differentiate WORD STRESS and SENTENCES STRESS.
In INTONATION we have RISING and FALLING INTONATION.
The best book I've found to teach ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION is English Phonetics and Phonology by Peter Roach (we can use this book to teach theory) and Ship or Sheep byAnn Baker.