Communicative competences and active language skills are essential for mobility and Europe-wide employability. University language courses should prepare nonlinguistic specialist students for the European labour market, equipping them with skills and strategies for autonomous learning and the application of new literacies. This paper covers the use of domain-specific corpora and concordance software as learning and investigation tools. The examples selected to illustrate this paper originate from an English course for environmental engineering students. They demonstrate how corpus-linguistic methodology can be applied by non-linguists as autodidactic tools. Students formulate search questions, find samples containing specific linguistic elements, assess the usefulness of the found information and choose items that are likely to provide them with the correct language in context they require.