Paul begins chapter 14 by saying that we should follow love and spiritual gifts.
Here, he provides more detail about spiritual gifts with a particular emphasis on tongues and prophesy.
For tongues, he talks about unintelligible sounds that "speak to God", but not man. In fact, another spiritual gift is needed to interpret the sounds. This contrasts the appearance of tongues in Acts 2, in which the speakers miraculously knew other human languages.
Paul's advise is that the people speaking in tongues should do so quietly at church, unless there is an interpreter. This is to maintain order.
Likewise, prophesy and gifts that build up the church should be encouraged. Paul believes that prophecy has a particularly strong effect on unbelievers whereas unintelligible tongues makes them think that the church is crazy.
At the end of the chapter, Paul has some advice that we might think is really strange. He says that women should be silent at church. He takes a very strong stance in that women should only ask questions about church to her husband at home. (v. 35)
I think there is a wide variance of opinions on interpreting this from that (1) it was culturally specific advice, (2) other passages by Paul presume or assume active participation by women, and on other hand, (3) women really should be silent at church.
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