To appear in C. Jones and E. Ventola (eds) New Developments in the Study of Ideational Meaning: From Language to Multimodality. Series: Functional Linguistics edited by R. Fawcett. London: Equinox Publishing Chapter 10 Mapping Ideational Meaning in a Corpus of Student Writing Sheena Gardner Abstract In the context of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) project, which aims to characterize student writing across 28 disciplines and four years of study, this chapter focuses on describing what university students write about, or ideational meaning. It focuses on Field, for example on whether students write about people, ideas or scientific entities, and more specifically on Angle on Field (Martin 1993), for example whether these are construed as phenomena (Mohandas Ghandi) or as metaphenomena (Approaches to the study of eminence). Building on insights from studies of disciplinary variation and progression, and of the nature of Sentence Subjects, an analytical framework is developed. Comparison with findings from studies of professional academic writing from English, History, Psychology, (Macdonald 1994), Science, (Gosden 1993), Economics and Business (Lewin, Fine and Young 2001) demonstrates the potential for Sentence Subject analysis of student writing. Detailed description of the planned 3000 assignments in the BAWE corpus is beyond the scope of the project; thus the focus narrows to mapping Assignment Initial Sentence Subjects. The proposed framework is original both in its intended scope of writing across multiple disciplines and years of study, and in its use of Assignment Initial Sentence Subjects. 1 Introduction As part of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) 1 project which aims to build and characterise a corpus of 3000 student assignments across disciplines and years of study, this chapter focuses on describing ideational meaning, or what university students write about. It focuses on Field, for example on whether students write about kings or cabbages, and in particular on Angle on Field or how students approach their topics, whether they write about Time, The soit-disant age of absolutism, or Recent literature reviews and meta-analyses. 2 The aim is to develop and test a framework for such description. This chapter starts by arguing for an analysis of Angle on Field through