Embodiments of the present disclosure describe a control signaling reception method and apparatus. The method includes: receiving to-be-received control signaling using a control channel, wherein the control signaling carried on the control channel indicates operation of at least two terminal devices; and demodulating the to-be-received control signaling; wherein the control channel occupies a part of subcarriers in a system bandwidth in a frequency domain. According to the embodiments of the present disclosure, common control signaling that can indicate operation of multiple terminal devices and user dedicated control signaling that can indicate an operation behavior of only one terminal device are carried on different physical channels for transmission. In this way, different resource mapping manners and different signal processing manners can be used according to different transmission requirements, so as to optimally balance resource overheads and transmission reliability of different types of control signaling, thereby improving transmission resource use efficiency.