The present invention refers to a method and a transmitter element (35) for transmitting channel information (CI) for link adaptation of a radio channel (33) in a wireless network (11). In order to allow for reliable and efficient transfer of the channel information (CI) and to adapt the detection probability to the importance of the CI as well as to the channel stability, it is suggested that the method comprises encoding (19) the channel information (CI) using multi-level coding, said multi-level coding (19) comprising combining multiple bit sequences (c1, c2, . . . , cn, d), each bit sequence (c1, c2, . . . , cn, d) corresponding to a coding level (1, . . . , n) of said multilevel coding (19) and assigning (37) one of said coding levels (1, . . . , n) to at least a part (ci1, ci2) of the channel information (CI) such that at least a part (ci1, ci2) of the channel information (CI) corresponds to the bit sequence (c1, c2, . . . , cn) of that coding level (1, . . . , n). Furthermore, the present invention refers to a method and a receiver element for receiving the transmitted channel information (CI).