The purpose of this study is to investigate the conjugation patterns of irregular verbs and their perception of irregular conjugation in prospective elementary school teachers. When endings are combined with stems, most verbs conjugate regularly, but some verbs use irregularities that change the shape of the stem or ending. However, in actual language use, the pattern of irregular conjugation is different from the standard type set in the Regulation of Standard Korean. In this paper, we surveyed the use of irregular conjugation and investigated the perception of irregular conjugation for first grade students of Gongju National University of Education. As a
result of investigating the conjugation patterns used by the students for the 10 irregular conjugation types, there was a lack of a basic understanding of the base forms of stems and conjugation, and Many non-standard variants appeared. And The use of variants differed by irregular type and verb. In general, regular forms were
used where irregular forms should be used, such a feature was most prominent in the ‘ㄹ’ irregular conjugation. The‘ㅎ’ irregular conjugation had a wide variety of variants. In some verbs in ‘ㅜ’ irregular conjugation and ‘ㅂ’ irregular conjugation, irregular conjugation forms were restructured into basic forms, and the new stems conjugated regularly. The mechanism of use of these variants was found to be diverse, including analogy, restructuring, semantic discrimination, confusion with similar words, the influence of dialects, and the economics of pronunciation or the weakening of final consonant.