Dyspraxia is a specific learning disorder characterized by a disorder in the organization of the gesture.
Dyspraxia is called “invisible handicap”, the indices are often trivialized and above all poorly understood, blamed on laziness, a lack of interest or an intellectual handicap.
A praxis (from the Greek, movement), it is a gesture, the know-how of a gesture, that is to say the result of voluntary motor coordination, not spontaneous, resulting from learning, by example writing. Once the process is acquired, this gesture and this task seem definitively spontaneous: they have in fact become automatic.
However, a dyspraxic person suffers from a dysfunction of the coordination and planning of gestures – disorders of the acquisition of coordination (TAC) – and only acquires these automatisms with difficulty. She experiences difficulties in programming and automating coordination of voluntary gestures: she suffers from a praxis disorder. This deficit in coordination of muscles and joints, control of posture, strength and direction of movement, contraction of muscles over time and space produces excessively awkward and ineffective gestures.
Writing, for example (when the task is not automated) induces an exorbitant and yet unexpected cognitive cost for the dyspraxic person, which does not allow him to release enough attentional resources for the other aspects of written language: conce see, lend pay attention to the meaning and spelling, synthesize, organize and develop. This is the whole problem of the double conscious task.
Dyspraxias are diverse: they can be constructive, (difficulties in assembling different elements); ideational, (difficulties in using and handling objects and tools); ideo-motor, (difficulties in carrying out symbolic gestures); oral-oral, (difficulty speaking, although understanding language); visuospatiale, (difficulties in “reading” ((texts, images) and writing); etc.,