Pronunciation course

So, I'm an EFL teacher with over 20 years experience. Our school (in Italy) is currently trying to organise a pronunciaton short course (9 hours). I'm going to be the teacher. I'd be interested for feedback on the issues I'm mulling over regarding content. Students will probably be upper intermediate and above, all adults.

• ELF (English as a Lingua Franca): Looking at this, they quite rightly point out that many features that mother tongue speakers use (connected speech, elision, assimilation, schwa, contractions, gonna etc) actually make mother tongue speakers more difficult for my students to understand than non-mother tongue speakers. This raises the knotty question about what features of mother tongue speech one should actually focus on when helping students with pronunciation!
• The issue about "accent reduction" and clarity also seems to be very contentious...I lived with a guy from Glasgow and seriously struggled to understand him. Very rarely do any of my students have this degree of "pronunciation problems". (Sorry if any Glaswegians read this!).
• Does anyone know of any resources where I can read up on what aspects of pronunciation are generally considered to be significant for "intelligibility".
• Having said all the above (and somewhat contrary to the tenets of ELF), my list of things I'm expecting to work on, because they're "typical" Italian problems include:
  • correct pronunciation of regular verbs past simple & past participle,
  • connected speech to get rid of the "uh" that many Italians stick on the end of words with consonants,
  • the "o" in company/love/money etc, which Italians pronounce like the "o" in "hot"
  • Stress timing
  • Contractions
  • Gonna wanna gotta
  • Schwa
  • Elision
  • Making the silent "r" silent e.g. in "weren't" they tend to pronounce the "r" roughly like in "parent"

So I think my general aim will be to try and identify and "reduce" those aspects of their pronunciation which "stick out like a sore thumb" and which could be construed as detracting from the "quality" of their language, whilst at the same time highlighting to them the conflicting issues surrounding "accent reduction".

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Ta