Paulina Moya Santiagos, UCL Institute of Education & Ana Sepulveda-Poblete, University of Warwick

The new “English in English” curricular reform announced by the Ministry of Education in 2019 intended that all 5thand 6th primary students from public schools should be able to engage in fluent conversations in English at an A1 proficiency level. In order to fulfil this goal, Chilean EFL teachers are expected to use English as the medium of instruction all throughout their lessons. However, little, if any, is known about the way teachers are dealing with this new methodological approach in their classrooms. Thus, this paper aims at examining their experiences and perceptions towards the new “English in English” curricular reform. To this end, six Chilean EFL teachers from rural and urban public schools in Chile completed a questionnaire about their perceptions towards this new initiative and were subsequently interviewed regarding their experiences and feelings teaching ‘English in English’. Overall, the results showed that all EFL teachers were willing to adopt the new reform, nonetheless they claimed that the following actions need to be urgently taken: increase the amount of time destined to teach the language, consider the students’ and schools’ realities and contexts, provide training to all EFL teachers without discrimination, and give them guidance on how to get support to meet the requirements posed by this initiative.

Key words: English in English reform, public schools EFL teachers, experiences and perceptions