It occurs to me that I forgot to gloss this, and that's silly.
CI is Comprehensible Input. It is the theory of presenting understandable, comprehensible, compelling ideas in the target language to our students. This is accomplished a lot of ways - story-telling, play-acting, drawing pictures, sometimes just flat-out glossing words or spot-translating. We can do this by offering communication tools to our students (I don't understand; stop; break that down; tell me that word; slow down) so that they are in control of their learning (plus minusve :D). Evan Gardner points out that to a certain degree, we have to be trained monkeys for them - if they say do that three times and we ever don't do it three times, we discourage them from communicating with us what they need.
A teacher I worked with once had a reputation for giving messages in the target language a lot, but frequently, the kids had no idea what was going on. She would chatter away in her language, but she did not give her kids any measures to communicate with her, nor did she encourage them to share when they didn't understand, nor did she check to see if her students understood. She got the input, but not the comprehensible. Her students, for the most part, didn't learn any of the language she was teaching because she wasn't telling them anything they understood.
When we speak too fast or in a way that is too complicated, when we introduce too many ideas at once, don't welcome our students' input, don't check with them and don't ask them to take an active role in their learning, we lose them. They stop understanding.
Similarly, if we were to consistently give them messages they understood, but the messages weren't interesting to them, we would lose them. I know I tend to glaze over in classes that aren't interesting to me, and we can't blame our kids for being any different.
This year, my sixth period determined that a man named Uncle Sam lives in the sky, he has no fingers, and he lives with a number of pretty ladies and owls (?!) who cook for him, answer the phone and so forth, because he has no fingers and so, apparently, cannot. He is, however, skilled at jailbreaks.
I get asked a lot why I tell crazy stories. Is that going to teach them to converse? Are they ever really going to need to say 'lives in the sky with owls who cook for him'? Yeah, probably not. But they will need those discrete words, and they will need those structures, and that story is going to offer those things to them, repeatedly. And they're going to remember it.
Bubbaquisha annoys her brother Balthazar, so he breaks her. Then he has to journey to the Underworld where there is a (I'm not kidding) Racetrac of the Dead. Pertinent to everyday life? No. Offers, repeatedly, a substantive second declension genitive plural? You bet. The point isn't necessarily in the story - it's in what stories offer. A lot of repetition and correct language for the students to fall back on when they, in turn, begin to say things. The first story I remember reading is about the Muppets and Gimme Gulch. I could recite that story like nothing else, and the story hasn't aided me much, but I bet the words and phrases in there did.
Second, the story is good because the kids created it. I definitely didn't have those things in mind when I showed up with my vocab and structures. The students did that. And because they did it, they're more likely to understand it, and they're more likely to connect with it and remember it and pay attention to it. Roma est in Italia is great for its cognates (and don't get me wrong, cognates are useful), but Rome being in Italy doesn't keep their attention. At the end of the day, I think (and please offer me more definitions!) CI can be simplified to this, whatever your classroom structure looks like:
giving our kids information in the target language that they understand and find interesting.
inviting our students to participate in their own learning.
I wish my French teacher had done that for me. All I learned about that year were ducks and Spandex.
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