Curriculum is the core of education, with a curriculum the education process will regularly and evenly. The minister of Education and Culture has created a new curriculum, namely Curriculum Merdeka, which will begin to be used in 2022. Several schools have implemented the Curriculum Merdeka, but not all schools in Indonesia have implemented this curriculum. The purpose of this research is to find out how the implementation of the Curriculum Merdeka in the context of English Learning, with a focus on finding out the progress, the challenges, and the recommendations.
In this research, researcher used descriptive qualitative research methods. This research was conducted at a state of Junior High School in Pontianak. The subject in this research were the headmaster, 2 teachers of English subject at 8th grade, 4 students at 8th grade, and 1 other subject teacher. Interview questions totaling 50 questions where researcher conducted interview offline to th Headmaster as many as 11 questions, two English teachers in the eight grade as many as 14 questions, other subject teacher as many as 11 questions, and also four students of eight grade as many as 14 questions. Researcher used interview and observation to collect data. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis.
The results obtained in this research, after implementing the Curriculum Merdeka in English learning, the progress are students became more active, creative, and also productive in learning and had more courage to speak in front of the class or present the products they were making on using English, even so there are several challenges namely the teacher experience about Curriculum Merdeka is still lack, difficult to manage the time, and the students ability in learning are not the same and teacher must be able to analyze students’ needs, so the recommendation from the challenges are teacher have to share and collaborate with each other to make a meaningful and varied learning, apart from that there needs to be good cooperation between schools, headmaster, teachers, students, and parents.

Keywords: Curriculum Merdeka, English Learning, Recommendations