A method signals a modulation scheme to user equipment on a control channel in a communication system. The method includes encoding the modulation scheme on a modulation specifier and encoding a number of channelization codes on a code group indicator. When the modulation scheme is other than quadrature phase shift keying with the user equipment being configured to support 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM), then set the modulation specifier to indicate that the applied modulation scheme is other than QPSK, encode a code offset on a code offset indicator, and set one bit of the code offset indicator to indicate that the applied modulation scheme is 64-QAM. Finally, the method includes transmitting the modulation specifier, the code group indicator, and the code offset indicator on the control channel to the user equipment.