Metaphorical competence refers to the capability of mapping between surface and underlying structures, which is an important language feature displayed by native speakers. Second language acquisition is to some extent a process of gaining metaphorical competence and constructing the metaphorical thinking mode as native speaker. This paper aims at improving metaphorical competence in vocabulary teaching with a focus on its core value in instructions of basic vocabulary, polysemy, cultural terms, and corpus methodology (?). It is suggested that teachers should, on the one hand, introduce more theories regarding cognitive linguistics to inform students the importance of metaphor adopting a top-down approach, and on the other hand, encourage students to improve their metaphorical competence by analyzing images such as action, objects, pictures, and films(?in films) using a bottom-up approach.