AbstractMany issues about the process of reading and remembering have arisen from recent research which focuses on various aspects of schema theory. This paper discusses Anderson, Pichert and Shirey's (1979) contention that content schemata is more important to the reader than textual schemata. After presenting a background of the development of schema theory, this paper examines research which supports either content schemata or textual schemata as the more facilitating set for reading and recalling discourse. The conclusion drawn is that the more useful schemata is determined by the context (reader‐material match), rather than one schemata set always being more important than the other.