Teaching Comprehension: Understanding and Linking Sentences

I'm reading: Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A Handbook, bu Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro. Join the conversation at: https://www.facebook.com/R16Book/ and see the reading guide for the book here.

Favorite Sentence (even though it has a comma error): "In addition to knowing the relevant meaning of the words of the text, the reader will need to identify sentence structures to interpret how words are related, and to link sentences to each other" (p. 14). 

To do this, we have to teach these things - but in how they influence and communicate meaning - not just about the grammar: 

• word order
• form of the verb
• demanding sentence structures
  • lengthy sentences
  • relative clauses
  • missing pronouns
  • single and double embedding of clauses 
• tracking pronouns (establishing who is doing what to whom) 
• Linking/connective words (correlative and subordinating conjunctions) and the subtle scenarios they create
• Tracking coherence across multiple sentences

The best strategy I know for this is Beers' Syntax surgery. 

And I played around with Noden's concept of a Grammar of Passages a little bit here and here.