he Chairwoman of Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools' (NIS) Board, Kulyash Shamshidinova, visited Shanghai International Studies Universities (SISU) on April 13, 2018, aiming to build educational ties with SISU in Chinese teaching.

 Jiang Feng, SISU University Council Chair, welcomed and talked with the NIS delegation, saying that SISU agreed to support NIS in Chinese language teaching through providing teachers and teaching materials. He emphasized that SISU enrolls more than 4,600 foreign students studying here annually and has rich experience in teaching Chinese.

During the meeting, Jiang also reviewed the development of SISU and its major of the Kazakh language. SISU’s Kazakh major has always been dedicated to training talents who are proficient in both Kazakh and Russian as well as understanding Kazakhstan's history, culture and national conditions, since it was founded in 2017, he said.

Shamshidinova and INS delegation visited the School of Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Kazakhstan Center before the meeting. She talked with the teachers and students and sent Kazakhstan music albums and poetry collections to them.

Eleven SISU students majored in the Kazakh talked with guests from Kazakh and sang the traditional Kazakh song “You Promised to Come” for them. Shamshidinova appreciated students' good command of Kazakh although they had just learnt the language for 7 months.

NIS was established under the proposal of President Nazarbayev. It aims to cultivate students and professors in the humanities and natural sciences. NIS operates twenty intellectual schools located in capital cities across Kazakhstan and offers trilingual lectures in Kazakh, Russian and English. In recent years, NIS has introduced Chinese classes.