With the advent of fast, powerful, cheap and accessible computer tools, the use of corpora has exploded in the last 20 years. In the field of language learning, however, their use is mainly restricted to researchers, course writers and teachers, while the benefits to the learner are largely second hand: rare is the teacher who allows a class direct access to corpus methodology. This paper argues that there is no reason not to trust at least advanced learners with corpus tools, and that there are significant advantages to encouraging a hands-on approach. After outlining the rationale underpinning this approach, we describe an English course where learners are required to apply corpus techniques to an existing corpus or one of their own devising. We then go on to describe our students’ own productions, using only corpus techniques and tools used by the learners themselves, all freely available on the internet and requiring minimal training.