A technique is provided that may be employed in multicarrier communications to improve the efficiency of error correction using symbol-oriented error correction methodologies, by reducing the number of error correction code symbols (102, 104 . . . ) that are received in error that result from a single channel error. More specifically, in this technique, bits from the symbols are allocated among the channels in such a way as to minimize the number of respective channels that are allocated bits belonging to more that one respective symbol during a respective transmission period.