本研究基于中美中学生英语写作类比语料库对中国中学生英语写作的词汇运用(词长)进行了描述和分析。统计分析显示,中国中学生的英语成绩与其英语写作的平均词长并不相关,但是中国中学生在不同长度单词的使用上存在明显的差异,即随着成绩的提高,越来越多地使用一些较长的低频词汇和两个字母构成的单词(主要是功能词)。进一步分析发现,中国中学生比美国中学生过多使用低频的长词,但又过少使用由两个字母构成的短词,这些发现对于我国中学和大学英语教学都有一定的启发意义。 This study describes and analyzes lexical usage (word length) of Chinese high school students’ English writing based on the English writing metaphor corpora of Chinese and American students. Statistical analysis shows that Chinese middle school students’ English scores are not related to the average length of their English writing. However, Chinese secondary school students have obvious differences in the use of words of different length. That is, with the improvement of scores, more and more use of some Long low-frequency words and two-letter words (mainly functional words). Further analysis found that Chinese middle school students use too many low frequency longwords, but too few short words made up of two letters. This finding is of some enlightenment to middle school and college English teaching in China.