Given its essential role in academic discourse, ideational grammatical metaphor (IGM) is an important part of academic literacy. The present study compares the 13 types of IGM between the English PhD theses written by Chinese students and those by native speakers. It is found that the Chinese advanced leaners have overall developed the IGM competence, but there remain such problems as overuse of non- nominalization, underuse of some others, low lexical variation, and wrong or incomplete metaphorization. In developing learners IGM competence which is a part of the general metaphorical competence, more attention should be paid the nominalization types of IGM, the improvement of the lexical variation, and the instruction of metaphorization processes.