Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be acknowledged, several shortcomings of schema-theoretic work may restrict its future usefulness. These areas of concern include the specification of component processes and their patterns of co-occurrence in less able readers; individual differences in comprehension style; efficiency of knowledge-based processing (including issues of automaticity, immersion, cognitive economy of representation, and economical deployment of resources); learning (including trans-situational integration and conceptual change); and nondenotative aspects of understanding. (Author/RL)