Jeannette Littlemore has just published the following paper:
Littlemore, J., Krennmayr, T., Turner, J. And Turner, S. (2012). Investigating figurative proficiency at different levels of second language writing. Research Notes, 47, 14-28.
One of the co-authors, Sarah Turner is a Department of English PhD student and James Turner was an MA student at the University. Tina Krennmayr is at VU Amsterdam.
The article is a final report from a research project funded by Cambridge ESOL ('Research Notes' is their publication). The focus was on the production of metaphor by learners of English.