This study aims to build a diagnosis model for authenticity of English teaching materials. According to psycholinguistic theory on mental lexicon constructs, the more authentic (i.e. identical to real life usage) the teaching materials of a second/foreign language are, the better they would help language learners. In Taiwan, an EFL environment, most input is in written form. Therefore, if successfully applied to analyzing English reading materials, this model should be beneficial to both English language instruction and curriculum design. Databases have been providing researchers with a tremendous amount of authentic corpus. This study compared the word frequency counts published by Cobuild with the vocabulary listed in Taiwan high school English textbooks and the most frequently used vocabulary list (both approved by the Ministry of Education) to diagnose their degree of authenticity. It is hoped that his model can help English educators in designing and selecting authentic teaching materials.