Abstract The main aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of early grade reading components: phonemic awareness, letter-naming, letter-sound, early word reading, and reading comprehension on first graders’ letter-word reading abilities. In addition, it was sought to check whether each of the components were inter-correlated. To achieve this objective, an experiment was conducted. It was conducted by adapting lessons from EFL Teachers’ Training Manual (USAID, 2013), from the book, Reading Is All around Us: Using Environmental Print To Teach Beginning Literacy Skills (2007) and from newly drafted English syllabus for first graders. Two independent groups were selected for experimentation. The experiment was carried out of the school schedule: in the afternoon shift including the weekends. One class representing the experimental group learned through the early years of reading components while the control group was taught regular lesson using first grade EFL text book. Data were collected from pre-test and post-test and analyzed using SPSS: independent sample t-test, paired sample t-test and Pearson Correlation. Results revealed that there were no a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups before the treatment since the mean was 1.913, with the p-value=0.871 greater than 0.05 (the alpha level). After the intervention, however, there were statistically significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control group on their letter word reading performance in favor of the experimental group with p=0.012 less than 0.05 (2-tailed). In addition, high levels of correlation could be detected between pairs of the reading components with p=0.000 which was less than 0.05 (2-tailed).These results could support that using early years of reading components was effective in developing students’ letter-word reading abilities.