An apparatus and method are provided for normalizing input soft metric to a channel decoder in a wireless communication system. A demapper generates soft metric using an in-phase component (Xk) and a quadrature component (Yk) of a received modulated symbol (Rk), a channel fading coefficient (gk) and a constant value (c) defined by a modulation order of the received modulated symbol. A normalizer receives the soft metric, computes a normalized log likelihood ratio (LLR) by multiplying the soft metric by a ratio of the constant value to a noise variance value, transforms the normalized LLR into a desired range and a desired number of bits, and outputs an input LLR of the channel decoder.