This study focuses on metaphoric competence and its relevance within the language concept fluency and communicative competence. Metaphors appear to be one of the obstacles for Chinese learners of English as an L2 in reading comprehension tasks. This study investigates the relationship between the receptive metaphoric competence and the reading proficiency of the learners to raise awareness among Chinese teachers of English as a L2. The results reveal thatthe two variables correlate, i.e. learners who are skilled at foreign language reading tend to have a higher level of metaphoric competence