The present invention discloses a method for requesting LTE RRC connection re-establishment and setting cause values as well as a terminal, and the connection re-establishment request method includes: an LTE terminal determines, according to the occurred scenario, which one of the following four types is the failure reason: radio resource failure, handoff failure, bottom layer error or UE-related error; and the LTE terminal initiates an RRC connection re-establishment request to the network side, wherein the RRC connection re-establishment request includes the failure cause value indicating the failure reason. The present invention can make the network side obtain the reason why the UE initiates the RRC re-establishment from RRC connection re-establishment request message, so as to take different subsequent operations with respect to these different failure reasons.