This paper focuses on planning a series of activities to train learners of undergraduate, non-philological studies in using a small specialised ad hoc corpus and the results they achieved in doing them. The procedure discussed in this paper is a part of a larger project which investigates the possibility of using a small specialised corpus with ESP learners in improving their written texts. The planned activities are carefully designed to address particular issues either related to the technical aspect of using and reading corpora or to some of the language issues that are (relatively) easily observable in corpus data. The set of devised exercises is referred to as a training programme meant to prepare and guide learners towards the status of more independent corpus users. The training was carried out as a part of an obligatory language course taken by the second year university students of tourism. The paper analyses the learners' success in dealing with each particular exercise as well as the major challenges encountered in the process. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations for future applications and researches are made.