About GramViva

What GramViva is

GramViva is a free, ad-free reference and practice site for English grammar. It currently covers 218 grammar rules organised into 30 topic categories, from articles and verb tenses to conditional sentences, modal verbs, and reported speech. Each rule is a self-contained lesson: a short definition, when to use the structure, how to form it, contrasted correct and incorrect examples, common learner mistakes, practice tips, and an inline quiz.

The site is aimed at intermediate self-learners working without a teacher, and at ESL/EFL teachers who need a clean, linkable explanation of a single point of grammar to share with a student. The content is written in plain English, avoids jargon where it can, and defines linguistic terms the first time they appear in a lesson. There are no accounts, no paywalls, and no advertisements.

The whole site is statically generated and works without JavaScript. Every rule has a stable URL, a canonical link, and machine-readable structured data so the content is usable both for human readers and for the language models and search engines that increasingly answer grammar questions on a learner's behalf.

Methodology: PPP

GramViva lessons follow the Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP)framework that is standard in initial English language teacher training. PPP is described in Jeremy Harmer's How to Teach English (Pearson Longman) and in the syllabi for the Cambridge CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL initial teaching qualifications, which are the two most widely recognised entry-level credentials for English language teaching.

A PPP lesson moves a learner from understanding a structure to producing it freely. Each rule on GramViva mirrors that arc:

• Presentation. The rule opens with a one-sentence definition, a short summary of when to use the structure, and the form (the building blocks: auxiliary verbs, word order, common collocations).
• Practice. Worked examples follow, showing the structure in context. Most rules pair correct sentences with common-mistake counter-examples, so the learner sees the boundary of the rule rather than a single canonical instance.
• Production.An on-page quiz asks the learner to apply the rule to fresh sentences. The quiz is included on the rule page itself rather than buried in a separate "exercises" section, so retrieval happens immediately after exposure — the point at which the testing effect is strongest.

Editorial standards

• CEFR alignment. Every rule is tagged with a Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level — A1, A2, B1, B2, or C1 — using the descriptors published by the Council of Europe. Learners can filter by level and teachers can match a rule to a course outcome.
• Counter-examples are mandatory. Each rule includes at least one common learner mistake with the corrected form alongside it. Showing the wrong form is a deliberate choice: error-correction studies in second-language acquisition (e.g. Truscott vs. Ferris debates from the late 1990s onward) show learners benefit from explicit contrast, not only positive evidence.
• Quizzes are retrieval-based.Each on-page quiz requires the learner to produce or select an answer rather than re-read the explanation. This follows the testing effect literature (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Dunlosky et al., "Improving Students' Learning", Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2013), which finds that retrieval practice produces stronger long-term retention than equivalent time spent re-reading.
• Validated against canonical references. Explanations are checked against established English grammar references — Michael Swan's Practical English Usage (Oxford University Press), the Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter & McCarthy), and Quirk et al.'s Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language — and against the descriptive evidence in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) where usage is contested.
• Plain English. Lessons are written for adult learners, not for linguists. Technical terms are introduced with a short gloss the first time they appear in a rule.

Editor

GramViva is edited by Derek Cowan, who is responsible for editorial direction, fact-checking, and final sign-off on each rule before publication. Contributions from other writers are reviewed against the editorial standards above before they go live.

The editor is a software engineer with a long-running interest in applied linguistics and language learning, and the site grew out of notes kept while teaching English to adult learners. Where a rule depends on a judgement call — for example, the boundary between American and British usage, or whether a particular construction is acceptable in formal writing — the lesson says so explicitly rather than presenting one variant as the only correct form.

Contact and feedback

Spotted an error, a typo, or an example that doesn't ring true? The fastest way to flag it is to open an issue on GitHub. Suggestions for missing topics — a structure you've looked for and not found — are equally welcome on the same tracker. Source for the site is at github.com/Derekcowan/gramviva.

If you'd rather start by browsing, the full grammar index lists every rule grouped by category and CEFR level.