The present invention is a method and apparatus for improving the performance of spatial temporal turbo channel coding (STTCC) used in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems called eigen-STTCC (E-STTCC) that employs eigen-beamforming to make use of orthogonal eigen streams in the MIMO channel. Singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied to the channel matrix producing a linear precoding matrix containing the orthonormal basis for the eigen streams. In a first embodiment, the turbo encoded codeword containing concatenated systematic and parity bits is precoded with the linear precoding matrix such that the systematic bits are transmitted over the eigen streams with highest power. In a second embodiment, the codeword is made up of interleaved systematic bits and parity bits prior to eigen beamform preceding, effectively interleaving the systematic and data bits spatially over the eigen streams. In an alternate embodiment, the data stream is interleaved at the input to the encoder.