<p>While studies of the language practices of bi/multilingual students in university English Medium Instruction in non-Anglospheric countries are well established, less attention has been paid to these practices in non-language learning university courses in the Anglosphere where the language of instruction is English. This study reports the language practices of three international Chinese students at an Australian university. The data is derived from a first-year tutorial in a teacher education course. During group tasks, the students interacted in Mandarin with each other and in English with an English-speaking local student. The focus of analysis was on the assigned discussion about assessment during which students displayed their stances to assessment. Conversation Analysis was used to analyse the data. It was revealed that students fished for information about a quiz with the local student in English so that student anxiety about assessment was a shared experience. In choosing Mandarin, the students discussed the appropriateness of fishing for further information about the local student’s performance in the quiz. The multimodal features of whispering and lowering the head when speaking Mandarin captured students’ orientations to norm breaching which treated the topic as taboo. The study has implications for practices in tutor self-reflection about their instructions and explanations, and for pedagogies that give attention to how students’ multilingualism can be used to leverage understanding.</p>