CTL3806 SCT the narrative of a learning incident

The following is actually one of my assignments for this week in the SCT course. The aim is to describe in the most possible detailed way a personal learning incident, i.e. a moment in which our mind learned something. The incident must restrict to second language learning. The narrative will be used as data to be analyzed and interpreted from SCT perspective.

I had trouble remembering a learning incident in detail. I tried to recall any passage of my student life when I learnt english, but I couldn't find a memorable moment. I think it might be due to the fact that I learnt English as a foreign language, which I believe it is a little different process form second language learning (SLL).

Generally in SLL we study a language in the classroom and after class, the outside world goes on in the target language. Whereas in foreign language learning (FLL) the world outside goes on in your native language. So classroom is generally the only context in which you use and need the target language.

Therefore I decided to look for an incident in the only context in which I actually had to learn a second language: On my time in Sverige (Sweden).

The story starts in 2006 in the city of Malmo, Sweden, during the very second week of August (summer) and this was the first day of the “Malmo festivalen” and at the same time, it was the last day of swedish classes.
I don’t remember very well what I did after classes, but at night, my friend and I headed to the festival. On our way to the concerts, there was a crafts fair, with jewelry shops, very beautiful.
My friend and I split inentendedly just looking at different things in the fair. It was dark already and all the lihgts were on, Malmo, and Sweden in general, is very bright at night, they have lights for everything, so the sight was beautiful, very engaging.
So delighted I was that I ended up alone looking at one silver bracelet hanging from a little wooden shelf of one of the jewelry stands/shops. I liked it, because, unlike everything else in Europe, this one looked smaller and very likely to fit my wrist. I reached out and touched it, looking for a price tag. I don’t remember the price, only that It was too expensive for my exchange undergraduate student budget.
While still holding it, I heard the clerk talking to a younger woman beside her. She didn’t seem to mind customers touching the items and she didn’t even looked at them, as we use to do in LatinAmerica, waiting for questions. She was rather indifferent... That was very hard to me, because I really wanted to practice my Swedish and expected the first turn in a conversation to come from native speakers, so I was waiting for her to ask me if I wanted to try the bracelet... unfortunately, she didn’t.
Therefore, I realized it was my task to start the conversation. First, I tried to remember a useful word... I remember the English expression excuse me and automatically, almost without noticing I uttered “ursakta!”,an expression we had learned in class. Then, I got her attention, but I didn’t know what else to say. It took me a few seconds during which I remember looking in my head for a verb that matched to try. I went over the verb list in my mind, almost reading it once again and I bumped into prova....
So I already had the key words of my sentence but I didn’t know how to put them together.
Suddenly, I noticed I was thinking in English, which is not my first language. As soon as I realized that, I got really nervous and felt I needed to hurry up, so I took the English sentence can I try this on? which help me remember the modal kan in Swedish, and then I just followed that structure to put the words together. Finally, I said “kan jag prova?”
The clerk replied: ja, prova, prova!! And that phrase just took all the anxiety away. I succeeded in that short and first conversation in Swedish and has the chance to see how that bracelet looked on me.