The objectives of this study were to create and explore comparable spoken corpora of health communication for second-language (L2) training purposes. A corpus creation methodology is proposed that enables eliciting language from several nurses (i.e., 15 anglophone; 15 francophone) from particular speech tasks (i.e., accompany a patient who received bad news; reformulate feelings in reaction to a diagnosis; and ensure a patient's understanding of a situation). Findings are then presented from a function-to-form corpus analysis, which compared the types of responses and linguistic forms used by anglophone and francophone nurses to convey empathy/sympathy. The main findings illustrate that specialized, comparable spoken corpora are potentially useful for extracting recurring language use and making cross-linguistic comparisons. Overall, such corpora may ultimately be used to inform L2 pedagogy.