In order to discover where pedagogical efforts need to be made in helping students to develop metaphorical competence in their writing, it is necessary to be able to show what distinguishes the kind of metaphorical language used by native and non-native speakers of the language, and if there are any differences between the kind of metaphors used in writing by native and non-native speakers of English of the same age and educational background and those used by older, more expert writers. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how we may arrive at a detailed description of the similarities and differences between metaphor use by different groups of writers through the application of a combined procedure of metaphor identification.