Improve your pronunciation & accent with ARM exercises 💪
“Have you done your ARM exercises?”
By the second month into my accent and pronunciation training classes, my students should be used to this question since I always ask this. But that is for good reason. ARM is my acronym for annotate-read-monologue, a three-step exercise routine that, done consistently, will lead to long term improvement in your English pronunciation and accent.
How to do ARM exercises
ARM exercises consist of three steps that go from easier to harder. You can use this on a See below for some examples and rationale.
1) ANNOTATE
How: Read the text slowly, marking all instances of the accent feature you are practicing.
Why: This helps you identify where the accent feature occurs so you know where to produce it.
To go on easy mode: use the tool ToPhonetics to automatically transcribe the words so you can more easily find the relevant accent features
2) READ
How: Read the fully-annotated text out loud, accurately pronouncing the accent features
Why: Your mouth will slowly learn how to make accurate muscle movements to commit this to muscle memory
Read the annotated text slowly, making sure to correctly produce all the sounds with the focus accent feature
3) MONOLOGUE
How: Talk to an imaginary friend slowly and carefully, using new vocab with the accent feature
Why: Monologuing is like talking in real life, except you can take your time to speak accurately. This is about the where AND the how
Talk slowly and carefully, making sure to produce all the instances of the accent feature. Try to use some words from the text.
Why this works:
Deliberate repetitive practice
Throughout your accent improvement journey, you should practice frequently. It’s similar to going to bodybuilding: if you want to build muscle and get fit, you can’t just exercise once a week, since you won’t see much results. When you do ARM exercises, you review the same text multiple times in different ways. This ensures you will see and practice the same words with the targeted accent feature multiple times, building muscle memory through your reps. Like this, your mouth muscles will get better and better at creating the particular sound and it will sound more and more fluent. Practice build speed, and while you may be slow at first, eventually you’ll get to the point where it comes naturally and sounds fluent.
Secondly, just like in how bodybuilding should be done with proper form, ARM exercises will force you to identify the proper situations that your accent feature occurs. You can’t exercise haphazardly because you will just get used to repeatign the same form mistake over and over, building a bad habit. Likewise, you can’t haphazardly repeat words as you need to know not just HOW to say the sound, but also WHEN to say it. This is deliberate practice, and it is important in replacing old habits with new ones, with the old habits in this case being the sounds of your native tongue that you’ve been using in place of the English sounds.
Easy to hard progression with visual aids and no audience
ARM exercises are also structured to go from easy to hard. First, while annotating, you can take your time to identify the phonetic environment your accent feature occurs as you just need to look at the text, or phonetic transcription. The same goes for reading out loud, as you can take your time with this now-annotated text to pronounce the sound as accurately as you can (it makes no sense to say the sound incorrectly as you’d just be building a bad habit). Finally, monologuing is the hardest since you have no visual aids (you’re talking to yourself, not reading), but you can take your time to think about what you would say to your imaginary conversation partner or audience without the pressure of an actual real life listener. In my years of teaching, many a student has tried to practice solely by talking with friends or coworkers only to find that the combined pressure of thinking about WHAT to say, HOW to say it, and having people WAITING for them to finish just resulted in them not practicing the sound at all. With ARM exercises, you don’t get this sort of pressure and can isolate the items you want to practice and can focus on accurately articulating your target sounds.
Practice builds speed:
The more you practice, the faster you get at finishing the steps of ARM exercises. At first you get faster at annotating visual text until the point where it becomes almost second nature. The more you practice reading, the faster your muscle memory kicks in, allowing you to speak the words faster and while still being accurate. Finally, the more you monologue, the faster you get at both identifying any upcoming accent features and then also articulating said accent features to the point that it becomes second nature to you.
An example from me:
When I first started learning Russian, I would read about Russian phonology and then annotate texts to understand how sounds changed depending on the sounds next to them. I would read it out loud after my annotations, and then talk to myself. Over time, this became habit, and nowadays the sound changes come naturally to me to the point that I don’t even think about them, even with new vocabulary—my mouth automatically articulates the right sounds since I’ve encountered those sound sequences countless times before.
How often should you do arm exercises?
You should do it as often as you can! it’s just like bodybuilding—even if you go to the gym just 20 minutes each time, you still will improve if you go consistently. Accurate consistency really is key. I tell my students that anything is good, as long as you do it frequently. Some days you may be busy so you might only be able to do a few paragraphs. Other days you might have more time so you can do ARM exercises on a whole article. And on others you might only have time for a few sentences! That’s fine! If you commit to doing at minimum one sentence, you will often find that you do in fact have more time and you end up doing several sentences or even a few paragraphs. Just keep on. The path to sounding native is a marathon, not a sprint. The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step!