The role of connectives has a degree of influence on the development of reading comprehension. The cloze reading tasks used in this research were designed by the researcher according to Fu-yi Xing's three-way distinction for compound sentences, including adversative, causal and additive. The cloze task use typical sentence patterns representing the 20 sub-types to understand how well connectives are understood by students in the higher grades of elementary school. The reading comprehension testing shows the higher grades of elementary school have developed the understanding of using different connectives. This study is aimed at understanding varying levels of reading performance with sentence patterns as markers of ability. These matters are described in more detail in the body of this thesis.