In this issue oiJRB, five articles have been brought together that broach the topics of metacognition and reading. While each article has a distinct metacognitive emphasis, what was striking to us in a reading of the articles was a lack of a clear metacognitive construct which subsumed the diverse interests of these authors and allowed us to see the connection and interrelated ness of the articles. In other words, though the articles study issues pertinent to metacognition and reading, it is not clear what principles of a metacognitive theory of reading explain the contributions of the diverse studies published here as well as elsewhere. One purpose of this editorial is to try to clarify what metacognitive construct does underlie studies of metacognition and reading. A second purpose is to understand the relevance of the studies published here to that construct. Baker and Brown's chapter, "Metacognitive Skills and Reading," in the Handbook of Reading Research (1984) provides a good look at what such a construct should subsume. At first glance, only the familiar parts of a construct present themselves: metacognition is knowledge about one's cognition, the regulation of one's cognitive processes, the development and use of compensatory strategies. Let's say that metacognition is a matter of awareness, monitoring, and compensation. Somehow, though transparent individually, these parts of metacognition seem opaque when trying to understand the whole that they define. The discrete, linear, chronological connotation of saying "metacognition is awareness, monitoring, and compensation" betrays the extent to which awareness, monitoring, and compensation interpenetrate, interact, and are simultaneous with one another in characterizing a whole greater than themselves. We feel that it is most helpful to view reading as a form of metacognition rather than as a process separate from metacognition. In this editorial, we consider the legitimacy and usefulness of saying that the process of reading is a form of metacognition. Following the lead of Baker and Brown, we discuss the concept of monitoring and its relationship to reading. Based on this discussion, we consider the relationship of compensation and awareness to monitoring in the metacogni-