This article focuses on the incidence of lexical transfer as a communication/learning strategy in the written English of 32 beginning Hispanic, disadvantaged students learning English as a Second Language at Bayamon University Technical College in Puerto Rico. Subjects were asked to write a detailed description in English of a simple ink drawing of a restaurant kitchen. A second, similar picture was presented for written description with the goal being the specific notation of the eight differences between the two pictures. Students could also list Spanish words that they wanted to use in the description for which they did not know the English equivalent. These descriptions were then analyzed for communication strategy use and transfer. Audio recordings of the student describing these difficulties were also made. Results confirm the usefulness of Poulisse's 1993 classification of communication strategies and demonstrated the correlation that exists between metalinguistic awareness of transfer's role in second language learning and the production and frequent use of transfer in production, suggesting that first language transfer has a role in second language acquisition. One ink drawing and one figure are attached. (NAV)