English Grammar Practice from A1 to C2
Grammar practice fails in a predictable way: the worksheet is written for “intermediate,” the student is not one intermediate, and the feedback arrives tomorrow. This article is about sitting grammar as a skill on My Path’s General English bank — one CEFR Level at a time, with a topic filter that actually exists, and with a choice between immediate feedback and exam mode.
The bank behind this is the same General English product described in the CEFR practice-test overview: about 577 items across vocabulary, grammar, reading, and writing, A1 through C2. Here the skill is grammar. The other three skills have their own pages. Do not treat this as a full course, a teacher, or an official exam. We are not affiliated with Cambridge or any awarding body.
What grammar practice is for on this platform
You are not here to collect rules. You are here to find out, at a stated band, which forms you can still choose under a little pressure and which ones you only recognise when the answer is already visible. That is a smaller job than “learn English grammar,” and it is the job a structured item bank can do.
A sitting cannot hear you. It cannot mark a paragraph you wrote from scratch. Grammar items here are closed or tightly structured: choose the form, complete the sentence, pick the option that is grammatical in that context. That is useful for accuracy. It is not a substitute for producing language at length.
If you need speaking or listening, this card will not grow those modes. They are not in the product. If you need writing as cohesion and register rather than as a form-choice drill, use the writing practice filter, not this one.
How the demand actually changes from A1 to C2
This is not a textbook contents page. It is a practical map of what “grammar at this band” usually means when you sit items, so you stop treating A2 and C1 as the same worksheet with longer words.
A1. The forms are few and they are doing basic jobs: be / have, present simple, articles in the most common patterns, pronouns, simple questions, very common prepositions. The trap is not complexity. The trap is speed and care — omitting s, mixing a / an, choosing the wrong pronoun because you translated from another language. Sit A1 if those still leak. Do not skip A1 because it feels unprestigious.
A2. Past simple versus present perfect starts to matter in real items, not just in a rule box. Comparatives, countable / uncountable, going-to versus present continuous for plans, the first conditional in ordinary contexts. Errors at A2 often look like “I know this” until two forms are both plausible and you pick by feel.
B1. Subordination shows up. Relative clauses, reported speech at a usable level, passives in common patterns, conditionals beyond the first, verb patterns (gerund versus infinitive) that you cannot fake from one example. B1 grammar is where many adults live for years: fluent enough to be understood, leaky enough that a careful reader still sees the joins.
B2. Control, not just coverage. You are expected to choose among forms that are all “English,” and only one fits the constraint: emphasis, contrast, hypothetical meaning, article use in less obvious noun phrases, tense in longer stretches. A B2 miss is often a miss of meaning, not a miss of a named tense.
C1. Density and precision. Inversion, clefts, hedging, participle clauses, nominalisation, subtle aspect choices. The item is rarely testing whether you have heard the structure. It is testing whether you can still choose it when the sentence is doing something else at the same time.
C2. Residual control under ugly constraints. Rare patterns, fine register differences inside grammar, the last article and agreement problems that survive in otherwise advanced writing. C2 sittings are not a personality test for whether you are “native-like.” They are a way to keep finding the last systematic leaks. If C2 items are mostly noise for you, you are on the wrong band.
Move band when the current Level’s grammar items are no longer teaching you anything you can name. Do not move band because a blog told you C1 is the goal.
Filter topic and Level on the card
On Education, open General English on the Practice shelf. The language axis is labelled Level, not Grade. Grade is maths. Set one CEFR band. Then set the skill or topic to grammar — the topic filter is a closed vocabulary, not a free-text search that invents categories.
That combination is the point. “Grammar, all levels” is how you get an average that means nothing. “B1, mixed skills” is a useful mixed sitting, but it will not isolate grammar. “B1 + grammar” is the drill.
Size defaults to 20. Use 10 when you only have a gap in the day. Use 60 when you already know the band and want volume, not when you are still discovering whether B1 is even the right Level. Timer off is the right first setting. Relaxed or exam mode comes later, when the question is no longer “do I know this form” but “do I still know it with a clock.”
Skip is allowed. Use it when you truly do not know, so the review list is honest. Flag when you guessed. Guessing without a flag is how a sitting score lies to you.
Navigation can be free or forward-only. Free is better while you are learning a band and want to go back. Forward-only is closer to an exam sitting. Grammar practice usually wants free navigation and immediate feedback. Save forward-only for a later check.
Immediate feedback versus exam mode
These are not cosmetic. They change what the sitting is for.
Immediate feedback shows you whether you were right before you have forgotten why you chose the option. For grammar, that matters more than for a long reading passage, because the whole item is the decision. If you picked have gone instead of went, you want to see that now, while the sentence is still in working memory. Use this until the band is familiar.
Review at the end (exam mode, in the sense of “no hints until you submit”) tells you whether the forms survive without a nudge. Use this when immediate feedback has started to feel like training wheels you are leaning on. A grammar score that only exists with instant confirmation is not a score you can trust on a real paper.
Do not mix the purposes in your head. Immediate feedback is teaching. Exam-mode review is a check. Running exam mode on a band you have never sat is a way to get a frightening number and no learning.
After submit you get correct / wrong / skipped, then retry wrong and retry flagged. For grammar, retry wrong is the whole method. A new sitting on a different topic will not fix the relative-clause leak you just revealed. Retry those items. Then sit a fresh grammar set at the same Level.
AI gap analysis is available with the Student or Monthly token entitlement. Use it to name the pattern — articles, verb patterns, clause combining — after you have looked at the misses yourself. Do not outsource the first look.
A practical way to use the six bands
If you already have a CEFR label from a school or a previous course, start there, or one band below if that label is old. If you do not, start at A2 or B1 unless you are a complete beginner (A1) or you already read demanding non-fiction for work (try B2, not C2).
A week of grammar-only practice that does not sprawl:
- Two sittings, size 20, same Level, grammar filter, immediate feedback.
- Retry wrong the same day, not “sometime this week.”
- One exam-mode sitting at the end of the week, same Level, still grammar.
- If the exam-mode sitting collapses, stay on the band. If it holds and the remaining errors are inattention, you can try the next Level next week — still grammar-only — and keep a mixed sitting so you do not lose the other skills.
Mastery on Education is per-topic, with complexity 1–5 and a topic master badge at 80%. Treat a low grammar bar as a scheduling hint, not as a personality. Sit the filter. Do not wait for a badge.
The same one-band rule that applies to mixed English sittings applies here. You cannot build a grammar pool from A2 and C1 at once. If you select several levels, one band still rolls. That is deliberate. Mixing those items would give you a grammar “score” that is actually a difficulty smoothie. The rationale is the same as why grade bands matter in practice, translated from maths grades into CEFR Levels.
Grammar is not vocabulary, and it is not reading
People blur these because English lessons blur them. On this card they are separate skills on purpose.
Vocabulary items ask whether you know the word or collocation at that band — see vocabulary practice. Grammar items ask whether the structure holds even when the words are familiar. You can know every word in a sentence and still choose the wrong form. That is a grammar miss. Drill it as grammar.
Reading items ask you to use grammar in situ, inside a passage. That is useful, and it is a different sitting: reading by CEFR. If you only ever sit reading, your grammar leaks hide inside comprehension. If you only ever sit grammar, you never see the form in a paragraph. Alternate. Do not merge them by sitting “everything” at every band.
Writing items, in this bank, often touch the same accuracy problems grammar does — agreement, tense, connectors — but they also ask about register and cohesion. If your misses on writing look like form errors, come back here. If they look like “this sentence is grammatical and still wrong for the task,” go to writing.
What this will not do
It will not teach you a rule you have never met, from zero, as well as a worked example in a course would. An item assumes you can attempt it. If A1 articles are new as a concept, you need a short explanation first — a class, a reference, a tutor — then the bank to see whether the explanation stuck.
It will not certify you. There is no official CEFR diploma at the end of a My Path sitting. Schools and employers who need a certificate need the certificate they named. Use this to practise the overlapping skill.
It will not replace extensive reading or actual writing. Grammar control that only exists inside a 20-item set is fragile. Keep reading at the band, and keep producing sentences of your own. The bank is the check, not the whole diet.
It will not give you IELTS or TOEFL grammar papers. Those products are Off. General English is the live English bank.
Access
Education sittings require Student or Monthly. For Me (€4.99) and Around Me (€9.99) include no Education. Student is €9.99/month with unlimited Education and no trial — the CTA is “Get Student — €9.99/month.” Monthly is €19.99/month with unlimited Education. GBP mirrors EUR; PLN prices exist on plans. Signup grace does not open the hub. Sittings are the entitlement; you do not buy grammar as a separate SKU.
The same CEFR grammar idea exists on the other language cards if English is not the language you need this month: German, Spanish, French. Each is its own bank. Do not expect an English grammar sitting to transfer.
For how Education is put together as a hub, see Education on My Path. For whether Student is the plan you actually want, see the Student plan.
Sit one band of grammar this week
Open Education, General English, one Level, grammar. Size 20, timer off, immediate feedback. Submit. Retry wrong. That is the practice. The rest of this article is context so you do not waste the sitting on a mixed-level pool or on a mode that does not match the job.