The present invention discloses a screen lighting method for a dual-screen terminal and a terminal. In this method, after detecting an operation performed by a user to trigger lighting of a screen, the terminal detects a quantity of touch regions on a first screen of the terminal and a quantity of touch regions on a second screen of the terminal, and the terminal lights a screen with a smaller quantity of touch regions. By analyzing a gesture of handholding the terminal by the user, a generality between a touch status of a screen that the user expects the terminal to light and a touch status of a currently unused screen is found. Therefore, the screen that the user expects the terminal to light can be determined relatively accurately based on the touch statuses of the two screens.