Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and discusses six essential constituents of schema theory: schema states; schema variables; instantiation; activation; episodic, semantic, and schematic memory; and high versus low integrity processing. It then presents insights into the verbal learning process that can be drawn from schema theory. The second section traces the roots of discourse analysis and discusses the following forms: cohesion analysis (which is closely associated with the surface structure of the text), propositional analysis (in which the text is analyzed in terms of semantic content rather than linguistic form), and story grammar (which attempts to define broader relations among broader segments of text than the other two techniques). (GT)