A temporal electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) system is proposed for in-plane rotation measurement. The relationship between the rotation angle and the phase change distribution is established and the rotation direction is indicated by the sign of the partial differential of the phase change distribution. Temporal phase modulation is applied in the proposed symmetric illumination ESPI system. The phase is recovered by the temporal intensity analysis method which uses the temporal evolution history of the light intensity. The system can perform dynamic measurements and provide results in off-line real-time. Preliminary experiments were carried out with a continuously rotating target to show the feasibility and the dynamic feature of the temporal ESPI system. At present, the mean absolute error of the experiment is 0.39 arcsec.