Exploring creativity and competence in online discussion forums using Virtual English as a Lingua Franca

English is the de facto national language of multilingual and multicultural Australia, and it is also the default medium of instruction in Australian universities, although domestic and international students in Australia are of a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This chapter explores the use of English by university students in online discussion forums for a particular course, titled “Writing Across Cultures”, in the Linguistics and English Language program at Monash University. One of the topics for this course is “exploring creativity and competence for writing across cultures”. This chapter explores the use of virtual English as a lingua franca (VELF) in discussion forums that focus on the concepts of “creativity” and “competence” across two cohorts in 2020 and 2021. Since the topics involve specific examples with encoded multilingual and transcultural references, students draw upon their linguistic repertoires when they unpack “creativity” and “competence” for writing across cultures, and interact with one another via VELF in the online discussion forums. A discourse analysis of the VELF data shows that students are not only well capable of decoding the multilingual and transcultural references in relation to creativity, but they also develop their meta-ELF competence, which involves multilingual awareness and effective transcultural communication strategies in an ELF setting, including VELF communication. Throughout the chapter, it can be argued that English as a lingua franca in the virtual environment, such as online discussion forums, can function effectively and sufficiently for the participants involved to unpack multilingual and transcultural creativity in the Australian university context. In the conclusion to this chapter, the implications of using VELF for developing meta-ELF competence of students in Australian universities are discussed.