SCHEMATA play an important role in L2 reading comprehension. Researches on discourse comprehension of L2 have shown the pervasive influence, on comprehension and memory, of schemata embodying knowledge of both the content and the organization of a discourse. ”A schema is an abstract representation of a generic concept for an object, event., or situation” (Rumelhart, 1977, p. 266). In other words, a schema is an idealized internal representation of knowledge and its relations (Mandler and Johnson, 1977; Steffensen, et al., 1979; Stein and Glenn, 1979). Schemata embodying background knowledge about the content area of a discourse or of the rhetorical structure of a story guide both the comprehension and recall. Readers bringing different schemata to bear on a text will give various interpretations in various aspects to the same discourse. This paper consists of two major parts. The first part briefly reviews schema theory and some empirical evidence of the effects of cultural background knowledge of content and structure schemata in L2 reading comprehension. The second part of the paper discusses the implication and application of the schema theory for L2 reading pedagogy.