Dyslexia is a persistent and specific literacy learning disorder that occurs in children who do not present any physical, psychological or sociocultural handicap and whose origin seems to derive from a neurodevelopmental disorder.
According to the ICD-10, dyslexics characteristically show difficulties in reciting the alphabet, naming letters, performing simple rhymes, and analyzing or classifying sounds. In addition, reading is characterized by omissions, substitutions, distortions, inversions or addictions, slowness, hesitations, visual tracking problems and comprehension deficits (PAHO, 1997).
For Etchepareborda and Habib, 2000, dyslexia is a difficulty in decoding or reading words, for which some of the intermediate cognitive processes between receiving information and elaborating meaning would be altered.
The main problem that dyslexia has is that it is not compatible with our educational system, since, within this, all learning is done through the written code, for which the dyslexic child cannot assimilate certain contents of subjects such as Knowledge of the Medium, because it is not able to arrive at its meaning through reading.
The dyslexic child must put so much effort into reading and writing tasks that he or she tends to become fatigued, lose concentration, become distracted, and reject these types of tasks. Parents and teachers process this behavior as disinterest and press for more effort, without understanding that these children, performing these tasks, feel as if any of us were suddenly immersed in a Chinese writing class.
Dyslexia is much more than having difficulties in reading and writing, since there are compression problems, short-term memory, access to the lexicon, confusion between right and left, difficulties in spatio-temporal notions …we must bear in mind that there are no two identical dyslexics and therefore each case is unique and does not have to present all the symptoms.