Bridging Policy and Practice: English Language Teaching and Teacher Readiness under Indonesia’s Merdeka Curriculum

Abstract

Indonesia’s Merdeka Curriculum expands flexibility, teacher autonomy, learner responsiveness, and assessment reform in English language teaching (ELT), yet evidence of how these expectations become classroom practice remains fragmented. This critical systematic review aims to explain how policy expectations are enacted in ELT, how teacher readiness shapes implementation, and how institutional conditions mediate policy–practice relations. An audited corpus of 50 policy, empirical, and conceptual sources was analyzed through quality appraisal, full-text extraction, thematic coding, cross-study comparison, contradictory-evidence analysis, and claim–source traceability. The findings show that implementation is neither uniform nor adequately explained by a binary distinction between ready and unready teachers. Teacher readiness operates through interacting cognitive, pedagogical, assessment, digital, and psychological capacities, while institutional conditions determine whether these capacities become sustainable practice. Classroom enactment consequently ranges across alignment, adaptive enactment, partial enactment, and implementation gap. The study proposes the Policy–Readiness–Enactment Framework, which conceptualizes curriculum implementation as a mediated process linking policy expectations, teacher interpretation, multidimensional readiness, institutional conditions, classroom enactment, and outcomes. The framework implies that professional development and curriculum evaluation should address readiness configurations and institutional capacity rather than individual teacher deficits alone.